Jersey Reparations Council, and was previously a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. Her legal and political commentary has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, and she has been interviewed on the BBC, MSNBC, and other media outlets. She has taught at Western Washington University and New York University School of Law. Dennie is a graduate of Columbia Law School and Princeton University.
She applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back, her first book, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Originalism Trap falls very close to the end of Chapter 2, “Stealing Our Liberties,” and it includes some direct recommendations for Americans to reclaim the rights they’ve lost to originalism’s takeover of constitutional interpretation. For instance, the first sentence on the page is “Inclusive constitutionalism argues that we should be strengthening rather than shrinking our substantive due process analyses in order to make the Constitution’s principles real for all of us.” And the next paragraph begins with the lines, “Positive rights such as these have been disfavored by the Supreme Court, to be sure. But the Supreme Court is disfavored by the public, and neither the Founders nor the Supreme Court have the final word in the nation’s ongoing dialogue about constitutional interpretation.”Visit Madiba K. Dennie's website.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the Page 99 Test worked for The Originalism Trap. The book rejects originalism as a method of legal interpretation and proposes “inclusive constitutionalism” as an alternative. And on page 99, I straightforwardly describe what that would mean with respect to the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process protections. Throughout the book, I aim to empower readers to play an active role in reshaping constitutional meaning. And here on page 99, I remind readers that there is no inherent finality to the Supreme Court’s decisions; without the public’s assent, the Court’s decisions are just words on paper. And, while I think my best jokes are on other pages, page 99 does provide just a taste of the irreverence with which I regard the Supreme Court. Browsers who opened the book up to page 99 would get a decent grasp of the book’s thesis and, importantly, see that they don’t need to be a lawyer to understand it. From both the substance and the style, a casual reader would recognize that this book about the Constitution is indeed for “we the people.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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