Gewirtzman on "Constitutional Emotions in the Antebellum United States"

Doni N. Gewirtzman (New York Law School) has posted "'Vital Tissues of the Spirit': Constitutional Emotions in the Antebellum United States," which is scheduled to appear in The Ashgate Research Companion to Law and the Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America (2015) (Nan Goodman & Simon Stern, eds.). Here's the abstract: 

This Chapter provides a framework for examining the ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between emotions and constitutional law through three interrelated lenses: text, instrument, and symbol. In the years before the Civil War, discourse about feelings impacted institutional struggles for interpretive supremacy over the constitutional text, affected the Constitution’s ability to function as a legal mechanism for emotion management, and shaped its status as a national symbol.

The Chapter is available for download here.

Hat tip: Legal Theory Blog