How to Be a Citizen: Learning to Be Civil Without the State

An expert on the writing of constitutions argues that the path to a thriving society begins with forgetting about them: "Not James Madison but Bob Dylan or Annie Lennox should be our guide" (Mark Tushnet).

In 2009, constitutional scholar C. L. Skach went to Iraq to help revise the constitution. She survived a missile barrage in the Green Zone—an event that proved a breaking point in her thinking about constitutions. In short: they don’t really work.

In How to Be a Citizen, Skach calls to ...