Duffy Ponsa on Ablavsky, "The Savage Constitution"

Over at JOTWELL Christina Duffy Ponsa (Columbia Law School) has posted an appreciative review of "The Savage Constitution," by former guest blogger Greg Ablavsky (University of Pennsylvania). The article appeared in Volume 63 of the Duke Law Journal (2014). Here's the first paragraph:

In this tightly argued and thoroughly engaging article, Gregory Ablavsky makes the case for a revisionist history of the U.S. Constitution that places Native American Indians at its center. While it isn’t hard to show that conventional constitutional histories largely neglect Indians, it isn’t easy to prove that such neglect is not benign. That is, it’s one thing to argue that standard accounts should include a discussion of Indians, but it’s another thing entirely to make a convincing case that core constitutional understandings would be fundamentally altered if historians fully and prominently integrated the history of relations with Indians into their narratives of the Constitution. Ablavsky aims for the latter, arguing that the history of the creation, drafting, and ratification of the Constitution should be rewritten with Indians in a leading role—and he does not miss the mark.

Read on here.