 Critical theories, both hard and democratic, represent a serious challenge not only to conventional theories and established practices of constitutional interpretation, but to the very idea of constitutionalism itself—the idea that government can and should be limited in ways that serve to protect us from unwarranted state power. According to originalism, the constitution protects us from judges and other officials by restricting them (largely) to politically and morally uncontroversial, neutral decisions about historical intentions and understandings. According to one strand of living constitutionalism, our evolving constitution can do the same while at the same time allowing the constitution to grow and adapt to changing circumstances and (it is hoped) better moral understandings. It can effect this balancing act so long as the judges, in whom the power of constitutional interpretation and enforcement has largely been placed, are willing to subject their deliberations to the discipline of common law reasoning. Critics, however, remain highly skeptical. Ordinary judges are not, critical theorists will insist, Platonic kings and queens, dispensing justice in the light of objective moral truth. We must always remember, critics insist, that our judges are ordinary, flawed human beings with all the intellectual and moral shortcomings, weaknesses and biases of their fellow human beings. They are also, more often than not, members of a dominant group (e.g., wealthy, white males) who share the social background, education, perspective, and values of that group. But if constitutions are all at the mercy of dominant ideologies and the whims and convictions of elite judges, then the kind of protections heralded by the idea of constitutionalism may be a myth, and a harmful one at that.