By Gerard N. Magliocca. The most remarkable constitutional argument ever forgotten is Representative William Loughridge’s dissent from an 1871 report by the House Judiciary Committee. That Report rejected a petition by Victoria Woodhull claiming that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave women the right to vote.
By S. Deborah Kang. New archival research shines a light on the anti-Mexican animus that motivated the authors and agents of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 and reveals that racism was a feature, rather than a bug, of the legislation that still impacts today’s immigration debates.
By Sam Erman and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. In an effort to dismantle the Citizenship Clause and the U.S.’s traditional recognition of “jus soli,” racist opponents to the Fourteenth Amendment set out to establish a practice of “jus sanguinis” with a weaponization of international law. These attempts backfired, and “country by birth” prevailed and more solidly reaffirmed as the Citizenship Clause.
By Katherine Shaw. David Pozen’s The Constitution of the War on Drugs reveals how constitutional law and values have largely been absent from the arguments surrounding the war on drugs—in an interesting contrast to the constitution’s central place surrounding the debates on abortion and reproductive freedoms.