Frames of progress: The political imagination of rights and liberties in the United States Supreme Court

Traditional narratives of American constitutionalism concerning civil rights and liberties are linear, positing that both progress and retreat move along a single conceptual axis. This dissertation argues that this narrative is a distinctive feature of the politics and commitments of twentieth century legal liberalism. It contends that an alternative agonistic model of American constitutionalism illuminates more effectively the political nature of constitutional decisionmaking in the United States Supreme Court. Unlike the linear progressive model, an agonistic model emphasizes not linearity and development but, instead, discontinuity and choicemaking between simultaneously desirable but ultimately incommensurable constitutional values. This choicemaking is structured by constitutional frames, which are prevailing ways of ordering constitutional priorities in light of elite constitutional opinion concerning historically unique fears, problems, and targets of reform.;This dissertation illustrates the operation of constitutional frames by undertaking cases studies of three sites of contestation over constitutional meaning, criminal procedure (with an emphasis on Fourth Amendment search and seizure), schools, and the workplace, across three historical periods, pre-1937, 1937--1954, and 1954--1970. The examination of the construction of constitutional meaning within these sites across time and frames suggests that certain rights, values, and liberties are preferred and others submerged on the basis of historically-situated reformist imperatives. The framed nature of rights and liberties across time undermines traditional narratives of American constitutional development, narratives which have been used both by scholars and by the Court to justify as progress constitutional policymaking in support of a particular and contingent reformist agenda.