Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret. By Emily Van Duyn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 284p. $99.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

suggests, Scalia spoke eloquently of protecting democracy from an unelected Court, but his definition of the concept was “quite simplistic” (p. 44). What does all this mean for Thomas’s The (Un) Written Constitution? While it is true that Black and Scalia used similar language about abiding by the Constitution’s text in critiquing fellow justices for straying too far from it, it is essential to understand the underlying principles that defined their interpretative approaches. To some extent, this is Thomas’s point. Justices, even those who preach fidelity to the text, rely on unwritten principles that are not part of the Constitution. As he writes, “all interpreters are making constitutional judgments that are choices not determined by text and relying on constructions of one sort or another to do so” (p. 140). This is a plea for recognition of something Thomas rightly claims is inevitable in constitutional interpretation. But his comparison of Black and Scalia implies a closer alliance on those principles than their opinions, taken as a whole, in fact show. Thomas’s focus is not just on Black and Scalia. In chapter 3, he explores early constitutional disputes about religious liberty and the meanings of freedom of speech and of the press in the context of Republican government. Chapter 4 considers the text and separation of powers. A fifth chapter returns to the concepts of unwritten understandings and the necessity of constitutional construction when interpreting the document. In each of the chapters, Thomas quite rightly argues that only with a close examination of these disputes can we understand “the political theory behind America’s republican experiment” (p. 60). For Thomas, this theory was not set by constitutional text, but the result of arguments about the “essential characteristics of republican government that the written Constitution rested upon” (p. 79). The (Un)Written Constitution is a thoughtful, wellwritten slim volume that I could easily see assigning in an advanced undergraduate constitutional law course. Indeed, by paying close attention to Thomas’s arguments, students will surely emerge as more confident constitutional interpreters in their own right and enhance their understanding of the necessity of exploring the principles that underlie the opinions of the justices.