At the present moment, the greatest threat to our constitutional democracy, and perhaps to our survival as a nation, is the autocratic aspiration of a President who claims to have been saved by God to institute a new era of American imperialism and interplanetary manifest destiny. It might seem in this context, with a President issuing executive orders that aggressively invite constitutional challenge, and a Vice-President who has advocated that the President should ignore Supreme Court rulings he deems illegitimate, that arguments about constitutional legal theory could only be of theoretical interest. That would be true if our constitution were at the most fundamental level a set of rules, and questions of constitutional legality were ultimately technical legal questions of interpretation and application, best left to the professionals. Our current crisis presents us with an opportunity to shake off this dangerously passive and deeply mistaken view of ‘our Constitution.’ This Article argues that we must stop thinking of ourselves as consumers of rights, granted to us by god and our founding documents, and the courts as the final authoritative determiners of the rights bequeathed upon us by history. We must come to recognize that no one gives us our rights except ourselves acting as a self-governing political community, and that the legitimacy of our constitutional authority as a people depends upon our continuing struggle as a people to realize equality before the law. No real reform of our legal and political institutions will be possible without a more fundamental reformation in our understanding, as citizens, of the relation between constitutional legitimacy and democratic self-rule. We need to ask anew the question “What is the law?” This Article presents a novel theory of fundamental or constitutional law, a theory which both helps to make sense of our current crisis in democratic constitutional self-governance and, we hope, can help inform strategies for responding to that crisis. We frame our account ...