by Gerard N. Magliocca
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.
by S. Deborah Kang
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.
by Sam Erman and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
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.
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.
by Adam Lebovitz
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.
by Logan Everett Sawyer III
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.
by Daniel D. Slate
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.
by Roderick M. Hills, Jr.
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.
by Evelyn Atkinson
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.
by Anna O. Law
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.