Professor Frank Michelman is one of the most respected legal scholars working in the Rawlsian liberal tradition. Through his many articles and books, Michelman has connected constitutional law and legal theory with Professor John Rawls’ enormously influential corpus of work on justice and political liberalism. Constitutional Essentials (Oxford University Press, 2022) represents the culmination of this intellectual effort and is a work that is sure to become a core point of reference for those interested in what a constitutional order inspired by Rawlsian liberal theory might look like.

Part I of this review essay provides an outline of Constitutional Essentials' core arguments. This includes Michelman’s reconstruction of Rawls’ thought on constitutional law and his adaptation of these ideas to more specific perennial questions of constitutional theory. This part should, I hope, highlight that Constitutional Essentials represents a careful and impressive feat of scholarship, one driven by sound normative aspirations.

Part II of this review argues that, notwithstanding its scholarly merits, Constitutional Essentials will – and for good reason - struggle to convince many readers that it can offer a compelling guide to, or frame for, structuring constitutional law and political life. Part II. A argues that Michelman’s project is unconvincing due to its excessive utopianism, and the serious lack of traction it has in the political practices of existing liberal democratic orders. Part II. B then outlines why those working within the classical natural law tradition – my own intellectual tradition - might reasonably reject the picture of political life offered in Constitutional Essentials, for reasons in addition to its utopianism. Here I suggest that the main reason why Constitutional Essentials is unacceptable to natural lawyers is because it seeks to unreasonably restrict public deliberation and political action on those questions where it is most important to be correct, including what helps to promote human flourishing and what is destructive of it.