Current 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.
Recent Issue: Winter 2025
“The Northern Man and His Corporations, the Southern Man and His Slaves”: Revisiting the Conspiracy Theory of the Fourteenth Amendment
by Evelyn Atkinson
February 14, 2025
The “conspiracy theory” of the Fourteenth Amendment, which has haunted legal scholarship for over a hundred years, has a basis in fact: for John A. Bingham and other advocates of corporate citizenship, the rights of corporations were as deserving of protection as the rights of Black Americans.The Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments’ Effects on Citizenship and Migration
by Anna O. Law
February 14, 2025
In defining US national citizenship for the first time, the Reconstruction Amendments produced contradictory effects for European immigrants, African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans for their citizenship rights, mobility, and ability to remain in the place of their choice.In Search of a State
by Maeve Glass
February 14, 2025
Amidst a project to transform land into waterways and cotton into cloth, Federalist elites carefully fashioned a bespoke rule of state protest that could keep New England’s merchant ships and cotton spindles in motion.
Book Review Symposium
The following essays review David Pozen’s The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024).
The “War on Drugs” and the Narrowing of Constitutional Imagination
by Aziz Rana
Books like The Constitution of the War on Drugs offer one model for how to break the effective monopoly judges enjoy over constitutional politics, by underscoring the narrowness of judicial imagination.Pozen and the Puzzle of Counterfactuals
by Louis Michael Seidman
Pozen’s book surfaces hard questions about historical contingency and the scope of the change that might have occurred in a counterfactual world.The Constitution of the War on Abortion
by Kate Shaw
Coming soon.
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
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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.