I am grateful to Professor Baum for his very generous review of Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. I am also grateful that Baum in his review and his response to mine highlights the normative significance of his research on judicial audiences. Dred Scott v. Sanford may have been wrongly decided, Baum suggests, because antislavery justices, not being able to predict the actual impact of their decision, should simply have freed Dred Scott as a matter of simple justice. In fact, all five southern justices in Dred Scott v. Sanford did simple justice by their light. More important, however, Baum is now self-consciously exploring central questions of American constitutionalism.

Questions concerning how governing institutions may be structured to achieve desired public purposes have animated political science scholarship since the “new science of politics” championed by The Federalist Papers. Madison famously insisted that well-designed constitutions provide officeholders with the incentives necessary to foster rights protection and the pursuit of public goods. Whether constitutional arrangements have functioned as the framers anticipated has inspired scholars as diverse as John C. Calhoun and Robert Dahl. Baum's work belongs in this tradition. His study demonstrates that Supreme Court justices at present lack the incentives to pursue aggressively what they believe is good law or what they believe is good policy. His emphasis on the judicial need for public approval, in fact, is quite similar to the framing recognition of fame and popularity as spurs to political action. Although ostensibly located in an entirely different scholarly tradition, Dred Scott v. Sanford highlights similar problems with constitutional institutions as originally designed. A constitutional system that staffed the national government with officials elected entirely by local constituencies, Part II of that work detailed, fostered political extremism rather than consensus solutions to political controversies.

Political science and public law at present must also confront institutional incentives that foster separatism rather than engagement with diverse fields and perspectives. Junior scholars interested in refereed publications and promotion are best advised to appeal to the narrow audience of potential reviewers. Martin Shapiro (“Political Jurisprudence, Public Law, and Post-Consequentialist Ethics: Comment on Professor Barber and Smith,” Studies in American Political Development 3(1) [1989]: 88–102) aptly summarized the professional obstacles to constitutionalist research when he noted “the danger that the political scientist who works on forestry will be considered a wonderful political scientist by foresters and a wonderful forester by political scientists” (p. 96). Given that we all want to be considered wonderful political scientists by political scientists, the temptation is to stick with political science, even if that means no one in either political science or forestry studies the politics of forestry. Shapiro's analysis also encourages narrowing focus. Political scientists, after all, who do empirical analysis of the Supreme Court of Maine during the Gilded Age want to be considered wonderful empirical analysts of the Supreme Court of Maine during the Gilded Age by those who do empirical analysis of the Supreme Court of Maine during the Gilded Age. The consequence of these incentive structures may be an academic future structured by field and disciplinary divisions between academic Eloi, whose theories lack empirical foundations, and academic Morlocks, whose empirical studies inform no theoretical debate. As happened in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, the stronger group will prey on the weaker, not realizing their mutual dependence. Political scientists and members of the public law field cannot escape this fate by adjusting the number of place settings at the separate tables we increasingly occupy. Rather, as encouraged by the book review editor of Perspectives, we need to change our dinner partners more often.