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Liberal constitutionalism embodies an aspiration to public moral justification. The practice of liberal politics, on this view, is bound up with an ongoing effort to justify our political arrangements to one another, an effort that must not be collapsed into the mere affirmation of community standards or conventions. This ideal of public justification lends support to judicial review, an institution that helps make constitutional government a publicly principled enterprise. But it also suggests the value of drawing the "political" branches into the interpretive project: the Supreme Court is not the final interpreter of our Constitution's liberal public morality. The "political" branches of the national government, and citizens themselves play a crucial role in the interpretive process. Viewed in this way, the theory and practice of constitutionalism embody ideals of virtue, citizenship, and community that add up to positive rejoinders to liberalism's communitarian and republican critics.

The paper is an analysis of Dworkin's attempt to develop, within liberal theory, a conception of community and associative obligations, where community is taken as a particular intrinsic value. Certainly, this attempt encounters various difficulties, like the insufficiently robust distinction between political community and other types of communities, as well as Dworkin's too narrow delimitation of the scope of activities and competences of political community. It is argued nevertheless that this endeavor is highly significant, complementing substantially the theoretical concerns of standard liberal theories.

This essay was originally written for an online collection of articles on liberal arts in urban contexts, but it has not been formally published. The beginning and ending discuss community learning as a specific pedagogic approach in a liberal arts context. I've revised it for our retreat not to advocate for community service learning (though I do regard CL as a Good Thing), but rather to air the speculations about the nature of the liberal arts -- inspired by Hannah Arendt and John Dewey -- that arise in the latter part of the paper, beginning in section III (p. 6). In my opinion, much of the public discussion of higher education (for example, in Arum and Roksa's Academically Adrift) is distorted by a commodifiction of knowledge, where knowledge is regarded as a Thing that can be transferred from teacher to student (the "banking model" criticized by Paolo Freire), and where community is construed as a sort of container in which students and faculty are housed. The alternative Deweyan view focuses on the activities of discovery, learning, and common purpose which are shared by all participants in college life.

We provide a justification for political liberalism's Reciprocity Principle, which states that political decisions must be justified exclusively on the basis of considerations that all reasonable citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. The standard argument for the Reciprocity Principle grounds it in a requirement of respect for persons. We argue for a different, but compatible, justification: the Reciprocity Principle is justified because it makes possible a desirable kind of political community. The general endorsement of the Reciprocity Principle, we will argue, helps realize joint political rule and relationships of civic friendship. The main obstacle to the realization of these values is the presence of reasonable disagreement about religious, moral, and philosophical issues characteristic of liberal societies. We show the Reciprocity Principle helps to overcome this obstacle.