In yesterday's New York Times Week in Review section, Linda Greenhouse has an article on the barriers liberals face in repopularizing the notion of using the courts to enact "profound social change."

  I was particularly interested in something Greenhouse notes more or less in passing: namely, that there is a relatively clear vision of the Constitution and the role of the courts that is popular among liberal activists and academics. It's not unanimous, as Greenhouse notes — for example, Cass Sunstein isn't on board. But there's actually a pretty wide consensus on a lot of issues, as she notes in this partial list:

It is easy enough to find consensus on a checklist that would include a robust reading of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, including the notion that some rights are fundamental; a constitutional interpretation not tethered to a search for the framers' original intent; invigorating the right to privacy to include personal privacy in the electronic age; restoring the shield of habeas corpus; and recapturing the government's ability to intervene for the benefit of African-Americans and other minority groups without being constrained by the formal and ahistorical neutrality that liberals saw as the conceptual flaw in the chief justice's opinion a little over a week ago invalidating two voluntary school integration plans.

  By way of contrast, my sense is that there is significantly less uniformity on these issues among activists and academics who are conservatives and libertarians. If you attend a Federalist Society event, for example, you're likely to find a lot of divisions on these and other questions among Federalist Society members. You'll find social conservatives, strong libertarians, various strands of originalists, Lochnerians, legal process Bickelians, Burkean conservatives, judicial minimalists, John Yoo Article II types, and many more shapes and sizes and combinations of the above. (Perhaps the only issue on Greenhouse's list for which there is relative consensus among conservatives is the racial preferences/affirmative action question, and even that is hardly unanimous.) I haven't done a poll on the question, but I do think there is much less of a single "vision" as to the proper role of the courts among conservative and libertarian activists and academics.

  UPDATE: On today's Times op-ed page, Adam Cohen reminds us of his favorite strategy: to condemn conservative decisions striking down legislation as outrageous activism and conservative decisions upholding legislation as abandonment of the judicial function, with as much discussion of Jim Crow and Lochner as will fit in an op-ed space.