Dictatorship in the American Founding
Adam Lebovitz
Throughout the Revolutionary War, America experimented extensively with forms of emergency governance explicitly modeled on the Roman dictatorship, at both the national and the state levels. Surprisingly, America’s leading authors and statesmen rejected dictatorship in the Constitution, not primarily from fear of concentrated authority, but because they deemed this institution ill-suited to the rigors of modern statecraft.
Originalism and the Path to Partisan Jurisprudence: The Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation inside the Reagan Administration
Logan Everett Sawyer III+
Documents from the National Archives and elsewhere reveal why Reagan’s DOJ first adopted originalism, and then transformed it to serve a deeply contested, partisan legal-policy agenda.
Infringed
Daniel D. Slate
The legal concept of “infringement” at the time of ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 meant that a right could be regulated—that is, given more definitive shape or partially curtailed or restricted—if the process by which the regulation came about was regulated through a duly elected legislature acting with the public good in mind.Farm-Bloc Federalism: The Rise, Fall (and Rise Again?) of a Constitutional Coalition
Roderick M. Hills, Jr.+
Between 1832 and 1932, politicians from a “farm bloc” of states in the South, Midwest, Prairie, and Mountain West embraced and then rejected the idea that the Constitution limited the federal government’s power over a variously defined set of issues. This history of federalism’s ups and downs illustrates how political parties generally craft doctrine to achieve stability in the face of disagreement about values and interests.
--Dan Ernst
