Against the grain of the times, Jurgen Habermas's grand theorizing defends the claims of reason, universality and normative validity. Among internationally prominent intellectuals on the left today, Habermas is a rarity: he insists the Enlightenment got it mostly right. For decades, he has been at work reconstructing what he sees as the damaged but vital legacy of Enlightenment rationality, rescuing its practical and emancipatory dimensions from the encroachments of technocratic and instrumental reason. The leading social theorist, philosopher and public intellectual in Germany, Habermas recently has taken his grand theoretical project from the realms of social and moral theory to the world of law and constitutions. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas turns his pioneering theories of communicative action and ethics to fashioning a discourse theory of law and democracy (p. 298). In doing so, he delves for the first time into contemporary American constitutional theory, using its ideas and controversies to develop important parts of his own proceduralist paradigm of law. In the rubric of American constitutional scholarship, Habermas has produced what is surely the most sophisticated process-based theory of constitutional democracy. On Habermas's account, the theory resolves some of U.S. constitutional scholars' most absorbing theoretical conflicts: fundamental rights versus democratic rule; interest group pluralism versus deliber-