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.
Articles
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.
A Regime of Statutes: Building the Modern President in Gilded Age America (1873-1921)
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.
Sins and Omissions: Slavery and the Bill of Rights
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.
Conservative Constitutionalism Reconsidered
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.
A Body Without a Head: Revisiting James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth on the Place of the President in the 19th Century Federal Government
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.
Designed to Ameliorate the Condition of People of Color: The Reconstruction Republicans and the Question of Affirmative Action
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
Resuscitating a Forgotten Fourteenth Amendment
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.