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.
by Maeve Glass
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.
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.
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.
by Kate Shaw
Coming soon.
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.