The Collapse of the New Deal Conceptual Universe: The Schmooze Project

Mark A. Graber

For more than twenty years, the participants in the Georgetown Constitutional Law Schmooze, the Maryland/Georgetown Constitutional Law Schmooze, and now the Maryland Constitutional Law Schmooze, as well as participants in constitutional law schmoozes at Princeton and Wisconsin, have engaged in a common enterprise that we might call “the schmooze project.” The existence and nature of any “schmooze project” is my synthesis, not the publicly acknowledged consensus of the whole. Still, the papers submitted, conversations initiated, and scholarship published by schmooze participants indicate that Georgetown, Princeton, Wisconsin, and Maryland have been sites for developing a distinctive approach to constitutionalism. This distinctive approach provides important and better conceptual tools for understanding contemporary constitutional predicaments in the United States.