Lawrence\u27s Republic

I am delighted and honored to participate in this symposium critiquing and celebrating the remarkable scholarship of Frank Michelman. I was a student of Frank-but of course we all are students of Frank. I also have had the good fortune to be a colleague of Frank-he has been a distinguished visiting professor at Fordham and has generously participated in a number of our conferences there. The only problem I had in preparing for the symposium is that Frank\u27s scholarship is so rich and wide-ranging that it was difficult to decide what to write about. I initially planned to write a paper on Frank\u27s famous arguments for constitutional welfare rights.\u27 Next, my paper was to be about Frank\u27s reflections in his Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School on constitutional containment and his musings in recent work on the thinness of constitutional law as compared with our richer commitments to justice. Then, I was tempted to write about Michelman and Democracy -to assess his book, Brennan and Democracy,3 and his articles developing a liberal republicanism. 4 I also thought of invoking a term Frank used to describe Justice Brennan- super liberal 5 -and writing about The Superliberalism of Frank Michelman. Or, focusing on the two intellectual giants who have most influenced Frank\u27s work, I thought of doing a paper called Rawls versus Habermas: The Struggle for the Soul of Frank Michelman., 6 But I finally settled on Lawrence\u27s Republic