Jud Campbell, Stanford Law School, has posted Four Views of the Nature of the Union, which is forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy:
This Essay summarizes four Founding-Era views about the nature of the Union and the key interpretive implications that followed from those views. In doing so, it emphasizes the importance of social-contract theory and engages a recent scholarly debate over the influence of the law of nations on Founding-Era constitutional interpretation. Without taking a position about which view of the Union was correct, the Essay aims to illuminate the range of interpretive possibilities, including ones informed more by social-contractarian premises than by the law of nations.
John Marshall (NYPL)
--Dan Ernst
