"Even war as a metaphor — the war on drugs, for example — can have a dramatic, and unequal, effect on civil liberties, as shown by the recent revelations of how widespread racial profiling had become before the public even had a name for the practice. 'You fly the metaphor of war, and constitutional protections all cut in one direction,' said Dennis J. Hutchinson, a law professor and historian at the University of Chicago. He said the 'deconstitutionalization of the automobile' — the ever wider discretion for police searches for drugs — 'is the most obvious recent example of panic moving the terms of discourse.'"
—Linda Greenhouse, "The Clamor Of a Free People," The New York Times, September 16, 2001
At 23 letters,
deconstitutionalization becomes the longest single-word entry in Word Spy's 1,700-word database. (The previous length champ was
PowerPointlessness, at 18 letters.) This word has been used in law circles for quite some time (since at least the mid 80s), but I believe the above citation marks its first appearance in the mainstream print media.
