By Austin Steelman. Arthur Machen Jr.’s 1900 Harvard Law Review article “The Elasticity of the Constitution” influenced the long rise of originalism--revealing many of originalism’s now essential features--and helped give birth to a dead Constitution that proved ironically vital and ever-evolving.
By Sanford Levinson. To what extent do legal academics, historians, political scientists, and high school teachers actually assign any of the The Federalist?
By Kevin Arlyck. Most accounts of the federal judiciary’s rise to independence tell a story in which the courts consolidated their authority—especially the power of judicial review—by tacitly agreeing to withdraw from partisan politics. But as this article shows, the most insistent assertions of judicial inviolability came not from courts, but instead from the executive branch officials.
By Roderick M. Hills, Jr.. By reducing the power of the Federalist agenda-setters to force through specific constitutional language with a reversion threat, the presumption of ambiguity respects contemporary norms of fair dealing, thereby advancing the goal of popular sovereignty with which Federalists defended the Constitution’s legitimacy.
By Andrew Coan and David S. Schwartz. A proper interpretation of the ratification debates undermines any principled originalist case for limiting federal power. It also calls into question the resolving power of originalism as a practical method for deciding controversial cases.
By Risa Goluboff. I have decided to share with you a very new project—about the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12, 2017. Those events have come to be called “Charlottesville.”
By Donald A. Dripps. Recent developments suggest that the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider a wide swath of doctrines from originalist premises. For the 2,414 inmates on death row—and for countless more who might join them in the years to come—history may be a matter of life and death.
By Daniel D. Slate. Hebraic republicanism found in rabbinic Judaism a set of sources and ideas that made it possible to argue that constitutional republics, with powers limited by the rule of law, were the only legitimate form of government. It had a profound influence on the founding, in particular in the formulation of the republican government Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4.
By Jack N. Rakove. At a time when the entire constitutional system is under extraordinary stress, Akhil Amar’s contribution to the collection Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past misses the opportunity to address topics that deal with our contemporary woes—as the other contributors to this volume do.
By Mary Sarah Bilder. Contrary to the conventional modern view, John Adams’s A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787) was deeply influential on the Constitutional Convention.