University of Wisconsin–Madison

Category: Issue 4 – Fall 2024

A Regime of Statutes: Building the Modern President in Gilded Age America (1873-1921)

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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.