Current Issue: Summer 2026
Articles
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Recovering the Lost Pragmatist Promise of Legal Process
The dim view of Legal Process Theory canonized by prominent scholars in the Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory movements in their attack on liberal legalism are mischaracterizations.
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“Perpetuate the Union, and Redeem the Honor of the Republican Name”: Monarchy, Empire, and James Madison’s Negative on State Laws
Recovering why Madison believed his proposed “negative” over state laws could translate the unifying force of monarchy into a republican form offers a corrective to flattened understandings of Madisonian nationalism. His famous arguments about faction and minority rights emerged from a broader project focused on reconciling national power, federal union, and popular government.
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The Birth of Compact Theory
For claims about constitutional interpretation that hinge on the Constitution’s “original meaning,” it matters whether members of the Philadelphia Convention, or the state ratifying conventions, or the early post-ratification congresses, asserted that the Constitution was a compact of the states; or whether, instead, compact theory was a novelty that gained adherents only much later.
Recent Issue: Spring 2026
Articles
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Constructing the Constitutional Legitimacy of the Administrative State: Congress and the Settlement of 1946
In a crucial moment in the history of the administrative state in 1946, Congress played a central legitimizing role by enacting the Employment Act, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and the Legislative Reorganization Act (LRA).
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The Civic Order of Progressive America: The Fitter Families Ideal and the Acquisition and Loss of U.S. Citizenship
In the first third of the twentieth century, American leaders affiliated with both political parties and the broader Progressive movement restructured the nation’s “legal civic order” to advance a Fitter Families ideal of American citizenship.
Dialogue: The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court
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The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise: an Introduction
By Maeva MarcusProfessor Marcus offers a short account of the checkered progress of the Holmes Devise.
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Reflections on the Two Most Recent Holmes Devise Histories of the Supreme Court (Including Mine)
By Mark TushnetI believe that Post addresses concerns about how judges worked the ideas into their opinions by seeing the Justices as proto-philosophers (or proto-legal-academics), who have a deep commitment to developing coherent schemas.
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Writing for the Holmes Devise
By Robert PostThe essential ambition of the Taft Court volume was to invite legal historians to once again conceptualize judges and their courts as cultural actors who respond to the same sets of tensions and challenges as those that spur all cultural actors to give meaning to their times. Tushnet is off base to dismiss this approach as a form of “conceptualism.”
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
- Donald Dripps
- 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
- Craig Green
- 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.