Volume 4, Issue 3 – Summer 2026
Articles
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Recovering the Lost Pragmatist Promise of Legal Process
The dim view of Legal Process Theory canonized by prominent scholars in the Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory movements in their attack on liberal legalism are mischaracterizations.
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“Perpetuate the Union, and Redeem the Honor of the Republican Name”: Monarchy, Empire, and James Madison’s Negative on State Laws
Recovering why Madison believed his proposed “negative” over state laws could translate the unifying force of monarchy into a republican form offers a corrective to flattened understandings of Madisonian nationalism. His famous arguments about faction and minority rights emerged from a broader project focused on reconciling national power, federal union, and popular government.
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The Birth of Compact Theory
For claims about constitutional interpretation that hinge on the Constitution’s “original meaning,” it matters whether members of the Philadelphia Convention, or the state ratifying conventions, or the early post-ratification congresses, asserted that the Constitution was a compact of the states; or whether, instead, compact theory was a novelty that gained adherents only much later.