Prosecutors Ground Constitutional Theory

A prosecutor’s day‑to‑day work—screening cases, approving warrants, and deciding whether to charge—reshapes how scholars should think about constitutional questions because it exposes tradeoffs and institutional incentives that appellate opinions obscure. Memoirs like Randy Barnett’s Felony Review show that academic legal theory divorced from prosecutorial practice risks missing how law operates in reality. — Putting practitioner experience at the center changes debates over originalism, criminal‑justice reform, and legal education by privileging institutional mechanics and moral judgment over purely doctrinal arguments.