by Adam Lebovitz
Throughout the Revolutionary War, America experimented extensively with forms of emergency governance explicitly modeled on the Roman dictatorship, at both the national and the state levels. Surprisingly, America’s leading authors and statesmen rejected dictatorship in the Constitution, not primarily from fear of concentrated authority, but because they deemed this institution ill-suited to the rigors of modern statecraft.
by Logan Everett Sawyer III
Documents from the National Archives and elsewhere reveal why Reagan’s DOJ first adopted originalism, and then transformed it to serve a deeply contested, partisan legal-policy agenda.
by Daniel D. Slate
The legal concept of “infringement” at the time of ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 meant that a right could be regulated—that is, given more definitive shape or partially curtailed or restricted—if the process by which the regulation came about was regulated through a duly elected legislature acting with the public good in mind.
by Roderick M. Hills, Jr.
Between 1832 and 1932, politicians from a “farm bloc” of states in the South, Midwest, Prairie, and Mountain West embraced and then rejected the idea that the Constitution limited the federal government’s power over a variously defined set of issues. This history of federalism’s ups and downs illustrates how political parties generally craft doctrine to achieve stability in the face of disagreement about values and interests.
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.