Current Issue: Summer 2024
Articles
A Body Without a Head: Revisiting James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth on the Place of the President in the 19th Century Federal Government
by Noah A. Rosenblum
August 13, 2024
James Bryce’s monumental 1888 treatise remains of special interest to present-day scholars of American public law because it directly affected subsequent developments in American political theory, public administration, and legal doctrine, by shaping how American public law reformers understood American politics.Designed to Ameliorate the Condition of People of Color: The Reconstruction Republicans and the Question of Affirmative Action
by Kate Masur & Gregory Downs
August 13, 2024
What we confront here is not the familiar (to us) struggle between competing historically and archivally grounded interpretations but something quite different: a confrontation between historical practitioners and their widely held understandings of both historical method and of historical analysis, and opportunistic lawyers seeking support for contemporary policies they prefer
Symposium: Graber’s Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty and the Second Founding
The following articles compose the first of a two-part symposium on “the Second Founding,” inspired by Mark Graber’s new book, Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty (U. Press of Kansas, 2024). The second part will be published in the Fall issue in November.
Resuscitating a Forgotten Fourteenth Amendment
by Anne Twitty
August 13, 2024
Mark Graber’s portrait of a forgotten Fourteenth Amendment presents a formidable challenge to existing interpretations, with significant implications for how we tell the story of Reconstruction and constitutional reform.The Reconstruction Amendments, American Constitutional Development, and the Quest for Equal Citizenship
by Rogers M. Smith
August 13, 2024
If we accept that the Reconstruction Amendments are the central hinge and bridge in American constitutional development, then we must conclude that a quest to secure equal citizenship for all should be taken as the lodestar of the American constitutional project, not just in the past but in the present and future.Finding Meaning in the Congressional Globe: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Problem of Constitutional Archives
by Rachel A. Shelden
August 13, 2024
In Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty, Mark Graber takes a comprehensive look at the 39th Congress, that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, through the Congressional Globe. Yet the Globe was far from an accurate depiction of congressional business, and it ultimately may tell us just as much about the public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as it does about legislative intent.
Recent Issue: Spring 2024
Ida B. Wells’s Train Ride in Memphis and the Dawn of Jim Crow
by Lee Harris
May 14, 2024
Most Americans know the story of Rosa Parks; fewer know the story of Ida B. Wells, who contested the nascent Jim Crow laws on the Tennessee railways more than 70 years before Rosa Parks’ famous bus ride. This article profiles Wells’ journey from small-town schoolteacher, to legal challenger in the fight against racial segregation.Racism, Black Voices, Emancipation, and Constitution-Making in Massachusetts, 1778
by David Waldstreicher
May 14, 2024
Black voices—even disembodied, anonymous, speculative Black voices—were part of the constitutional conversation in Massachusetts in 1777-78. If that isn’t being present at the creation of the American republic, then terms like “founding” and “creation” lose most of their meaning.The Democracy Effects of Legal Polarization: Movement Lawyering at the Dawn of the Unitary Executive
by Deborah Pearlstein
May 14, 2024
In the 1980s, a conservative legal movement began to advance a unitary executive theory of constitutional power inside the Executive Branch; these efforts functioned to kneecap a suite of post-Watergate ethics reforms designed to guard against corruption or other misconduct by government lawyers, which, over time, has led to an increasingly polarized system in which career advancement, not punishment, awaits lawyers willing to place partisan loyalty above professional obligation. This serves as a troubling case study of the range of harms legal polarization poses to constitutional democracy inside court and out.Executive Power, the Royal Prerogative, and the Founders’ Presidency
by Andrew Kent
May 14, 2024
The wide divergence among modern scholars about the meaning of the Executive Power Clause reflects real ambiguity in the text of the Constitution and the historical records. But by far the least plausible original meaning of the Executive Power Clause is the one which sees it as granting an undefined amount of British royal prerogative power to the president.
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
- Bertrall Ross
- Rachel Shelden
- Franita Tolson
- Robert L. Tsai
Managing Editor
- Jennifer Hanrahan
Editors
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- 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
- Christopher W. Schmidt
- Sarah A. Seo
- Jed Shugerman
- Reva Siegel
- Rogers M. Smith
- Brad Snyder
- Clyde S. Spillenger
- Matthew Steilen
- Karen Tani
- George Thomas
- 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.