Integral Legal Scholarship

Last week Don Beck sent me a link to a recent article in the prestigious academic journal The Michigan Law Review that applies an integral analysis to recent Supreme Court cases that have addressed morals legislation, such as laws against bigamy or sodomy. This article, entitled: Evolving Objective Standards: A Developmental Approach to Constitutional Review of Morals Legislation, by Christian J. Grostic, can be downloaded here:

http://www.michiganlawreview.org/

I was impressed by the way Grostic used the stages of the spiral of development to identify how the Supreme Court regularly strikes down laws justified only by the morality of traditional consciousness, while upholding laws that can be justified from the moral level of modernist consciousness. This underscores the fact that the Constitution of the U.S. distinctly exemplifies modernist morality, and thus provides a clear standard by which to evaluate the legitimacy of various kinds of State morals legislation. It is on this basis of this modernist moral reasoning that the Court recently struck down a Texas sodomy law.

At the end of the article, Grostic explores the ways in which the Court has also occasionally exhibited the application of postmodern moral standards in its analysis of laws against prostitution. This article is thus a prime example of the power that “the expanded vertical perspective” provided by integral consciousness can bring to an important area of our society such as the decisions of the Supreme Court.

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SM