I begin this exploration with a comment by Justice Holmes at seventy-one, speaking to the Bar Association of the City of New York. He is discussing the role of timing in judicial decisions, timing indeed in constitutional law. Holmes is alone as a legal theorist in focusing so heavily on it – on the notion of readiness or unreadiness, of a social context within which legal and constitutional rulings are made. But consider: what of court intervention in public school segregration, in prosecutorial fairness and police coercion of confessions, disparate state laws against abortion, affirmative action in employment discrimination, the constitutionality of laws barring same-sex marriage, the juvenile death penalty? Has not the context and timing of judicial rulings in these matters, for good or ill, been a large measure of their apparent justification – or lack thereof?