The longer I have taught constitutional law, a span now approaching a quarter of a century, the stranger I have found the whole enterprise of governing via a written constitution, espe cially a hard-to-amend written constitution with a powerful con stitutional court like that of the United States. Yet in that same quarter century, what was once a unique governmental structure has (with great variations) come to be widely imitated through out the world, in national, regionally transnational, and incipi ently global institutions. Ironically, many of those same developments clearly also have the potential to transform basic features of the American constitutional system rather radically in the decades ahead, perhaps by incorporating elements of it into one or more transnational governments of various sorts. Hence I am simultaneously increasingly struck by our system's peculiarity, impressed by its exemplary success, and piqued by the growing possibility that in at some important respects it may not long endure. The sense of strangeness I have about the American consti tutional enterprise echoes the astonishment I had when I first read Mar bury v. Madison early in my college years. Here was the cornerstone of the whole grand edifice of judicial review. And yet its textual foundations, though not absent, were so wafer thin; its logic, though not unreasonable, so eminently debatable; its motivations, though indeterminable, so patently questionable. How could a mighty temple have been erected on this brittle shale? Still, I thought, it seems to have worked; so I focused on understanding how it worked and why it worked. That is also how I thought about the whole enterprise of written constitu tionalism that is so central to the reasoning of Mar bury (more so than any specific constitutional language). I soon learned our familiar mantras of the constitutional system's how and why. The point of a written constitution for a republic is to settle as clearly as possible a number of basic questions of governmental pow rs, procedures, and purposes so that we can both enable our selves to get on with our public and private lives and curb arbitrary, unjust political conduct. For that enterprise to work, the written limits must have some sort of ongoing enforcer, par ticularly in a potentially anarchical federal system; but this is concededly a if necessary power. It may be most safely assigned to an independent judiciary, well versed in textual inter pretation, structured and socialized to value and benefit from the rule of law, insulated from immediate political pressures, but least dangerous because it possesses neither purse nor sword. The ultimate popular rule that republican principles require is preserved by having both the original constitution and its