Current Issue: Summer 2025
Articles
“Right in Theory, Wrong in Practice”: Women’s Suffrage and the Reconstruction Amendments
by Gerard N. Magliocca
August 13, 2025
The most remarkable constitutional argument ever forgotten is Representative William Loughridge’s dissent from an 1871 report by the House Judiciary Committee. That Report rejected a petition by Victoria Woodhull claiming that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave women the right to vote.Creating a “Mass Production Technique”: Anti-Mexican Racism and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952
by S. Deborah Kang
August 13, 2025
New archival research shines a light on the anti-Mexican animus that motivated the authors and agents of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 and reveals that racism was a feature, rather than a bug, of the legislation that still impacts today’s immigration debates.Jus Soli Nation to Jus Soli Evasion: International Lawyers for White Supremacy and the Road through Wong Kim Ark
by Sam Erman and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
August 13, 2025
In an effort to dismantle the Citizenship Clause and the U.S.’s traditional recognition of “jus soli,” racist opponents to the Fourteenth Amendment set out to establish a practice of “jus sanguinis” with a weaponization of international law. These attempts backfired, and “country by birth” prevailed and more solidly reaffirmed as the Citizenship Clause.
Book Review
The Constitution of the War on Abortion
by Katherine Shaw
David Pozen’s The Constitution of the War on Drugs reveals how constitutional law and values have largely been absent from the arguments surrounding the war on drugs—in an interesting contrast to the constitution’s central place surrounding the debates on abortion and reproductive freedoms.
Recent Issue: Spring 2025
Articles
Dictatorship in the American Founding
by Adam Lebovitz
May 14, 2025
Throughout the Revolutionary War, America experimented extensively with forms of emergency governance explicitly modeled on the Roman dictatorship, at both the national and the state levels. Surprisingly, America’s leading authors and statesmen rejected dictatorship in the Constitution, not primarily from fear of concentrated authority, but because they deemed this institution ill-suited to the rigors of modern statecraft.Originalism and the Path to Partisan Jurisprudence: The Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation inside the Reagan Administration
by Logan Everett Sawyer III
May 14, 2025
Documents from the National Archives and elsewhere reveal why Reagan’s DOJ first adopted originalism, and then transformed it to serve a deeply contested, partisan legal-policy agenda.Infringed
by Daniel D. Slate
May 14, 2025
The legal concept of “infringement” at the time of ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 meant that a right could be regulated—that is, given more definitive shape or partially curtailed or restricted—if the process by which the regulation came about was regulated through a duly elected legislature acting with the public good in mind.Farm-Bloc Federalism: The Rise, Fall (and Rise Again?) of a Constitutional Coalition
by Roderick M. Hills, Jr.
May 14, 2025
Between 1832 and 1932, politicians from a “farm bloc” of states in the South, Midwest, Prairie, and Mountain West embraced and then rejected the idea that the Constitution limited the federal government’s power over a variously defined set of issues. This history of federalism’s ups and downs illustrates how political parties generally craft doctrine to achieve stability in the face of disagreement about values and interests.
Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
- David S. Schwartz
Senior Editorial Advisors
- Mary Sarah Bilder
- Jud Campbell
- Jonathan Gienapp
- Risa Goluboff
- Alison L. LaCroix
- John Mikhail
- Farah Peterson
- Richard Primus
- Aziz Rana
- Bertrall Ross
- Rachel Shelden
- Franita Tolson
- Robert L. Tsai
Managing Editor
- Jennifer Hanrahan
Editors
-
- Gregory Ablavsky
- Richard Albert
- Jack M. Balkin
- Samantha Barbas
- William Baude
- Maggie Blackhawk
- Pamela Brandwein
- Holly Brewer
- Tomiko Brown-Nagin
- Christine Kexel Chabot
- Andrew Coan
- Saul Cornell
- Mary L. Dudziak
- Max Edling
- Laura F. Edwards
- Sam Erman
- Daniel R. Ernst
- William B. Ewald
- Martin S. Flaherty
- Matthew L.M. Fletcher
- William E. Forbath
- Maeve Glass
- Sarah Barringer Gordon
- Mark A. Graber
- Joanna Grisinger
- Ariela Gross
- Roderick Hills
- Daniel Hulsebosch
- Martha S. Jones
- Laura Kalman
- Andrea Scoseria Katz
- Andrew Kent
- Michael J. Klarman
- Heinz Klug
- Felicia Kornbluh
- Anna O. Law
- Thomas H. Lee
- Sanford Levinson
- Gerard Magliocca
- Jane Manners
- Maeva Marcus
- Julian Davis Mortenson
- Cynthia L. Nicoletti
- Victoria Nourse
- William J. Novak
- James E. Pfander
- Jack N. Rakove
- Gautham Rao
- Noah A. Rosenblum
- Christopher W. Schmidt
- Sarah A. Seo
- Jed Shugerman
- Reva Siegel
- Rogers M. Smith
- Brad Snyder
- Clyde S. Spillenger
- Matthew Steilen
- Karen Tani
- George Thomas
- William M. Treanor
- Mark Tushnet
- Anne Twitty
- Michael Vorenberg
- Rosemarie Zagarri
- Mary Ziegler
About the Journal of American Constitutional History
Who We Are
The Journal of American Constitutional History is a peer-reviewed web-based journal publishing high-quality scholarship on U.S. constitutional history. Our editorial board includes over 60 leading scholars in the field.
Why We're Here
We seek to promote inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarly dialogue on constitutional history at a time when law office history is increasingly casting its shadow over both scholarship and jurisprudence. Our Journal provides a space for scholarship that tries to understand the past, rather than to distort it to influence present controversies.
With a rapid and hassle-free publication process, the Journal of American Constitutional History offers an attractive alternative to both student-edited law reviews and print peer-review journals.
What We Publish
We seek articles from the disciplines of law, history, or political science that focus on historical questions touching on the American Constitution or constitutional development, or that contain a substantial element of historical analysis in addressing contemporary issues of U.S. constitutional law.
We accept articles of varying lengths and allow authors to conform to the norms and citation styles of their disciplines.