The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. By Larry D. Kramer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 363p. $29.95.

The provocative premise of this book is that “the people themselves,” in James Madison's phrase, are the enforcers of constitutional boundaries and limits. In Larry Kramer's able hands, popular sovereignty is not an abstraction, where the people quickly fade from view and the Constitution they ratified is given life by courts and lawyers. On the contrary, Kramer seeks to document how the people themselves are not just active participants in the constitutional enterprise but the fundamental bearers of constitutionalism.