by Andrea Scoseria Katz
At a time when the Supreme Court is turning its sights on the administrative state and enhancing the profile and powers of the president, it is worth recalling that behind our national complex of agencies lies a one-hundred-and-thirty-year regime of statutes, a finely wrought constitutional settlement designed not only to release power, but also to contain it. We upset this balance at our peril.
by Richard Primus
Why did the Constitution originally contain no bill of rights? One important reason was that the delegates believed that an attempt to compose one might wreck the entire enterprise over the issue of slavery.
by Dennis J. Wieboldt III
Leading scholars have uniformly overlooked one of the most significant philosophical influences on conservative legal thought in the United States: natural law. With the publication of his Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal, Jonathan O’Neill has made a welcome entry into this historiographical lacuna.
by Noah A. Rosenblum
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.
by Kate Masur & Gregory Downs
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
by Anne Twitty
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.
by Rogers M. Smith
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.
by Rachel A. Shelden
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.
by Lee Harris
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.
by David Waldstreicher
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.