This is my third post on Wilkinson's book, so I suppose I should read the thing. Jeffrey Rosen gives it a very positive review in the NYT. Here's his opening paragraph which summarizes the argument better than I can:
In courts and law schools across America, the most intense legal battles are fought over theories of constitutional interpretation. From the originalists on the right to the living constitutionalists on the left, each of the warring camps claims that it has discovered the true faith and accuses its opponents of hypocrisy. Now comes Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III with a bracingly clear and bipartisan message: All the theories are bunk! According to Wilkinson’s “Cosmic Constitutional Theory,” “the theories have given rise to nothing less than competing schools of liberal and conservative judicial activism, schools that have little in common other than a desire to seek theoretical cover for prescribed and often partisan results.” As a result of their cosmic theorizing, Wilkinson concludes, liberal and conservative judges and justices are too quick to second-guess the choices of legislatures, and the casualty is “our inalienable right of self-governance.”
Wilkinson - as we know - argues that there is no overriding theory that fits the Constitution and that justices who attempt to develop and apply such theories are overriding the will of the people. He strongly promotes judicial restraint and suggests that the best justices of the past (Holmes, Brandeis, Frankfurter, Harlan and Powell) deferred to Congress and the executive unless there was an overwhelming reason to do so.
