University of Wisconsin–Madison

Tag: Austin Steelman

The Birth of the Dead Constitution: Arthur Machen Jr.’s Early Twentieth-Century Originalism

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.