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.
Pozen’s book surfaces hard questions about historical contingency and the scope of the change that might have occurred in a counterfactual world.
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.