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ing a greater uniformity and standardization of criminal sentences. Common Law Judging is short: The table of authorities, notes, references, and index comprise more than half the book, and it is even shorter if one considers its many, admittedly helpful, redundancies. At the same time, it is dense, subtle, and rich in pregnant distinctions and resonant formulations. The book carefully engages with the relevant philosophical and jurisprudential literature concerning objectivity and subjectivity, both generally and within law. Notably, however, it neglects significant recent work by prominent legal scholars like Kunal Parker, David A. Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, and Philip Hamburger that either explicitly addresses or implicitly raises questions about the relationship between the common law reasoning and constitutional adjudication. The nature and degree of that relationship is not at all obvious, and, here, Edlin simply assumes it rather than argues for it. One question that both Hamburger’s Law and Judicial Duty (2008) and Edlin’s book raise is the appropriateness of simply importing our understandings of (traditional, English) common law judging into the United States, where the common law inheritance functions as part of a broader constitutional order structured by a written Constitution premised upon a different set of problems, structures, and logics. Many of the critiques of subjective judging that Edlin is writing against arise out of that other institutional paradigm. That paradigm, moreover—including the concept of the neutral judge— is underwritten by an extensive tradition of (modern) liberal political and constitutional thought, extending from Locke to Madison to John Rawls. In that context, it is not surprising that Justice Sotomayor’s comments triggered concerns that have long been prominent in American politics. To be sure, the common law ideals that Edlin celebrates were once more widely known and appreciated than they are today, especially in the nineteenth-century glory days of the nation’s (elite) bench and bar. But from the Founding forward, from Thomas Paine, to “The Jeffersonian Crisis,” to the Codification Movement, to the rise of the “statutory” or “policy” state, there have been major movements to rid the nation entirely of its common law inheritance and traditions, or to mitigate their sway. In another rub, in the United States (and unlike in Great Britain), many of the state and local judges most closely engaged with the common law are democratically elected. The problem is further complicated by the ties of the nation’s appointed, life-tenured federal judges, via the appointment process, to its often boisterous and contested partisan politics. Judges are most likely to be charged with “legislating from the bench” when their interpretation of the Constitution tracks partisan cleavages on major public (and, these days, highly personal) issues that might reasonably be understood—and were once historically understood— to be the legitimate province of legislatures, or of state, rather than federal, courts. Common Law Judges is most convincing when focused on its core task: explaining why demands for strict objectivity in judging are epistemologically misguided, and why, in recognizing this, common law institutions not only permit some degree of subjectivity in judging but also invite and structure it. The American Constitution, however, not only permits but invites and structures a sometimes robust democratic politics. That some rulings by judges draw spirited attention to the inflection point where one system abrades against the other is a necessary, inevitable, and, perhaps even, at times, worthwhile part of the process.