[citation needed] He subsequently worked as an attorney at the Children's Defense Fund and began teaching at Harvard Law School in 1974.
[2] In January 2009, Parker, a mountain hiker, underwent surgery for cervical decompression and fusion, from which he awoke paralyzed with tetraplegia, partially a result of doctors’ failure to monitor electrical signals in his spine.
Professor Lee Strang subsequently characterized this appeal as "arguably the first modern call for scholarship in the vein of popular constitutionalism.
[15] In it, he offers two competing "takes" on Thomas Mann’s politically-inspired novella Mario and the Magician, "Populist" and "Anti-Populist," to question the "sensibilities" of constitutional law, or assumptions about the attitudes and political energy of ordinary people.
Parker contends that the Anti-Populist sensibility, which views the political energy of ordinary people as defective and potentially dangerous, prevails in conventional constitutional law discourse.
[5] Parker then questions the suppositions that the majority's view rules in the United States and that the judiciary's role properly protects minorities from supposed majoritarian tyranny.
[16] His Populist alternative would see ordinary people "deflate" legal discourse of its appeals to "higher law" and instead center constitutional argumentation on "political controversy about democracy.
[20] In his testimony, Parker eschewed historical comparisons to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, contending that such analyses would "freeze-dry" the meaning of the Constitution's provisions to previous factual situations.
Because a majority of Americans polled support amending the Constitution to grant Congress the power to prohibit and criminalize flag desecration,[23] Parker believes that the Supreme Court's holding is out of step with the values of ordinary citizens.