Weekend Roundup

• "On the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, Harvard Law historian and legal scholar Bruce H. Mann argues that colonists were fighting to uphold English common law rights and traditions" (Harvard Law Bulletin). 

• The Penn Carey Law School welcomes Christian Burset to its faculty. 

• An appreciation of the late John R Wunder (AHA Perspectives) .

• After appearing in "The Last Minute" segment of CBS's "60 Minutes," Jill Lepore wins the Pulitzer Prize in History for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. The National Review is not wholly persuaded.  

• A notice of Stanford’s “America at 250,” one-unit course, cross-listed in the History and American Studies departments and the Law School.  It is “an exploration of where America has been, and based on that, where it might be going or might need to go,” according to Jonathan Gienepp, who is one of its instructors, with Pamela Karlan (Stanford Daily).

• A Q&A with Len Niehoff about his new book, Meeting Shakespeare at the Bar: Reading the Bard Through the Lens of the Law (American Bar Association, 2026) (Michigan Law). 

• On Thursday, May 7, Christine Chabot, Jane Manners and Lev Menand presented papers on removal, with a comment Nick Parrillo, in one of the Academic Paper Workshops at the Spring conference of the Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section of the American Bar Association."  

• "Alex Votta recently received Michigan Law’s Dimond Prize for his paper “The Great Rampart in Protecting Human Liberty: The Right to Education in Antebellum and Reconstruction Black Constitutional Consciousness.”  He credits Sam Erman, Rebecca Scott et al. (Michigan Law).

• The subsequent lives of the subjects of Dorothea Lange's Depression-era photographs (National Gallery of Art).  

• From the New York Times: "A Look Inside the Case That Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires" (Buckley v. Valeo).  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• From In Custodia Legis: A Brief Legislative History of the U.S.-Canadian Border and Nathan Dorn on James Wilson and Natural Law in the First Years of the Republic. 

• Rodger Citron interviews Samantha Barbas on the Civil Rights setting of her book on New York Times v. Sullivan (Touro Law Review Podcast).   

• On May 5, the Historical Society of the New York Courts and the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, Third Department, will host New York’s Own Revolution: The Anti-Rent War of the Hudson Valley and Its Relevance Today, a film screening with Bruce W. Dearstyne, Nancy Newman, and Victoria Kupchinetsky, 

• On June 24, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum will host The Original Debates over Constitutional Interpretation with Jonathan Gienapp. 

• On June 25, Jesse Wegman, a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, will speak at the Atlanta History Center on his book The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution.

• On September 17, the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College will hold the latest version of its annual event, What the Constitution Means to Us, with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Akhil Reed Amar. 

• For Law Day, the Supreme Court Historical Society posted Judge Jon O. Newman's conversation with Ross Davies on three lost early circuit court opinions by the justices. 

• When, in his address to Congress, King Charles III said that “the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances” he apparently was referring to Catholic University professor Derek Webb’s article in the Journal of Supreme Court History, “What Say the Reeds in Runnymeade? Magna Carta in Supreme Court History,” says the Supreme Court Historical Society.   

• Part 2 of the Lawbook Exchange's April 2026 list of Scholarly Law and Legal History is here.

• ICYMI: A Lancaster, PA, museum opens an exhibit on Thaddeus Stevens (WGAL). Frankfort, Kentucy, courthouse may be renamed in honor of John Marshall Harlan (Kentucky Today). The Rise and Fall of Judge William H. Simmons (History Link).  Lawrence Glickman, Cornell University, on birthright citizenship in the advice columns (Atlantic).

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers 

Allread, "Indigenous Constitutionalism"

The Harvard Law Review has published "Indigenous Constitutionalism," by Tanner Allread (University of California, Los Angeles). The abstract:

By standard accounts, there are fifty-four constitutions across the federal, state, and territorial governments of the United States. But in fact, there are 230 other governmental constitutions that currently govern peoples and territories within the United States. These constitutions not only flow from a sovereignty that existed prior to the United States but also came out of a legal movement that asserted its independence from both the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions.

This Article tells the story of these constitutions — the constitutions of Native nations. Having existed for over two centuries with an archive of thousands of constitutional documents and amendments, tribal constitutions have been left out of the narratives of American constitutional history while being obscured within the fields of American constitutional law and federal Indian law. This Article corrects these oversights and calls for the recognition of a tradition of “Indigenous constitutionalism” in the United States.

This Article’s aims are both theoretical and historical. On one hand, it conceptualizes Indigenous constitutionalism as a distinct and shared constitutional practice through which Native nations claim and exercise self-governance while embedded in the wider constitutional — and colonial — landscape of the United States. On the other hand, this Article draws Indigenous constitutionalism’s features from the two-hundred-year history of tribal constitutions. It explores, for the first time, three major eras of tribal constitutional development: the first constitutions during the early nineteenth-century period of Indian Removal, the explosion of constitutions under the Indian Reorganization Act in the early twentieth century, and the movement for tribal constitutional reform that has stretched from the late twentieth century to today.

But this Article also brings theory and history together to rethink the prevalent narratives surrounding tribal law, federal Indian law, and American constitutionalism. Indigenous constitutionalism reveals the fundamental and persistent questions around which a tribal constitutional law framework can be constructed. It also revises the origin stories of federal Indian law, demonstrating that the field did not coalesce in isolation from tribal law but was actually cocreated with tribal constitutions. Finally, by placing tribal constitutions into conversation with other American charters, Indigenous constitutionalism disrupts and expands the category of constitutionalism itself. This Article demonstrates that tribal constitutions — unique among American constitutions — showcase how these documents can appear in many forms, function as external-facing declarations of sovereignty, and exist alongside other forms of fundamental law. 

Read on here (or at SSRN). 

-- Karen Tani 

 

Siddali to Speak on 19th-Century US Constitutions in Comparative Perspective

[Via H-Law, we have the following announcement.  DRE.]

Please join the State Constitutions Lab on Thursday February 26 @ 1:00 PM (Eastern US) for a Zoom seminar with Silvana R. Siddali, [St. Louis University, to discuss her paper "Fire Eaters, Revolutionaries, and the Rule of Law: Nineteenth Century State Constitutions in Comparative Perspective."

[Professor Siddali's] area of specialization includes constitutional, legal, and political history of the United States, in particular, the role of human rights in the development of democratic and judicial institutions.  Her current book, Transatlantic Constitution-making: Struggles over Democracy, the Rule of Law, and Human Rights, 1820-1870 is under contract at Johns Hopkins University Press and focuses on nineteenth-century transatlantic political communities that were connected through an exchange of ideas, trade, migrations, and technological innovations.

This meeting will be held on Zoom and a copy of the paper will be sent to all who RSVP here.

JACH (Winter 2026)

The Winter 2026 issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History is now available online:

Sovereign Power and the Sweeping Clause
John Mikhail

Contemporary disputes involving the separation of powers take on a different light when they are framed in terms of powers of the Government of the United States itself. The “all other powers” provision of the Necessary and Proper Clause distinguishes government powers from executive powers and gives Congress distinct legislative authorities with respect to each of these categories.

Symposium: A Tribute to Kenneth Kersch

Ken Kersch and the New Legal History: Beyond the Internalist/Externalist Divide
Dennis J. Wieboldt III

For Ken Kersch, developments in twentieth-century American constitutional law could not be adequately explained by either neat doctrinal evolution or the raw exercise of political power.

Ken Kersch as a Scholar of “The Other”
Sanford Levinson

Ken Kersch’s remarkable scholarship generates profound questions about the difficulties—and even limits—of truly engaging with those who do not share certain ontological or epistemological commitments.

Ken Kersch and the Meaning of Development: Law, Ideas, and the Politics of Constitutional Change
Michael A. Dichio and Paul E. Herron

Ken Kersch showed us that constitutional development is not a story of inevitable progress, but of contested traditions, shifting coalitions, and the discontinuous, non-linear unfolding of political development.

Broadening The Terrain of Political and Constitutional Thought, Unmasking Delusional Constitutional Arguments
Carol Nackenoff

By broadening the terrain of political and constitutional thought, Kersch brilliantly examined how constitutional faiths are forged and “law stories” are woven to create common identities.

The Roberts Court and the Past and Future of Religion as a Constitutional Concern
Julie Novkov

The Roberts Court’s reconfiguration of free exercise and anti-establishment doctrine is not a simple conservative backlash. Rather, it creates a viable path for empowering a right-wing religious political project.

The Roberts Court’s Reconstruction of Church and State
George Thomas

Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) breaks with past understandings of the Free Exercise Clause by merging a state discriminating against religious individuals with a state declining to fund religious institutions.

Five Lessons from Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution for the Present Moment
James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain

Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution helps us see the second Trump Administration, not as an aberration, but as the fulfillment of certain conservative ideas that have been “hiding in plain sight.”

Forgetting Nothing, Learning Nothing: Constitutional Scholarship and the Political Development of the Modern Supreme Court
Calvin TerBeek

The "Lochner Era" was invented decades after the fact, and the 1970s were legal liberalism's zenith, not its decline. Constitutional law professors' standard story of legal liberalism gets it wrong on the front and back ends.

States’ Rights and Civil Rights: Barry Goldwater, Bill Buckley, Richard Nixon, and Southern Realignment
Sean Beienburg

Did invocations of states’ rights by southern segregationists permanently discredit constitutional federalism? A re-examination of the 1960s political realignment suggests Americans can embrace—or re-embrace—this feature of our Constitution, while remembering state autonomy is a strong presumption but one that has always been checked by the Constitution’s rights guarantees.

The Phenomenal Constitution
Austin Steelman

In Conservatives and the Constitution, Ken Kersch demonstrated that the continually reimagined Constitution is a “phenomenon” in American life, not an epiphenomenal result of more substantial politics.

Orthodox Originalism and Conservative Identity after Ken Kersch
Logan Everett Sawyer III

Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution showed not just that the conservative political movement shaped arguments about the Constitution, but that arguments about the Constitution were key to transforming a varied group of interests disaffected by New Deal and Great Society Liberalism into a coherent political identity and thus a powerful political order.

Sunday Roundup

• Aziz Rana, Boston College, will discuss his book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, as the 21st Annual Pro Lecture in Legal History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on Monday, February 23, 2026, 12:15 p.m.–1:15 p.m. in the Thomas & Mack Moot Court Building. 

• Orville Vernon Burton will deliver “The First Amendment and Lincoln’s Constitutional Legacy” in the Clemson University Humanities Hub's annual Lectures in Law and Humanities Series on March 5 at 5:00 p.m. on the Watt Auditorium. 

• The University of St. Thomas's notice of Anthony M. Joseph's amicus brief in Chiles v. Salazar on the history of medical licensing in the United States.

• Adam Feldman on How academic briefs shape Supreme Court decisions (SCOTUSblog).

--Dan Ernst

De and Shani's "Assembling India's Constitution"

Rohit De, Yale University, and Ornit Shani, University of Haifa, have published Assembling India's Constitution: A New Democratic History (Cambridge University Press): 

 In this paradigm-shifting history, two leading historians of India re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, Ornit Shani and Rohit De instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.

--Dan Ernst 

Sunday Roundup

• Now available on-line, a recording of that National Constitution Center town hall, The Story of the U.S. Constitution: Past and Present, with Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight, and Annette Gordon-Reed. 

• Also newly available online: Michael McConnell and Noah Rosenblum's debate on originalism at NYU Law on November 19, 2025. 

• William M. Treanor, the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Constitutional Law and Constitutional History and Dean Emeritus of Georgetown Law, will deliver the 2025 Gouverneur Morris Endowed Lecture of the Bronx County Historical Society at Fordham Law, which is co-sponsoring the event, on Wednesday, January 28, 2025 at 6:30 pm.  Dean Treanor’s topic: “The Constitution’s Penman, Gouverneur Morris" (New York Almanack).  

• Jeremy Kessler on the law and history of bans on history of viewpoint discrimination at a Columbia Law School alumni luncheon.  (The event is called the "Stone Circle" Luncheon, and I'm embarrassed to say I was slow to get the reference.)  (Columbia Law School). 

• 
  Heidi Kitrosser reviews Patrick G. Eddington, The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression from McKinley to Eisenhower (Georgetown University Press, 2025) (Lawfare).

• ICYMI: The 1924 Immigration Act is back, unfortunately (The Guardian).  The Rise of Scholars' Amicus Briefs.  "Gun carry regulation was always the norm" (The Hill).  "A (very) short history of Crimes Against Humanity" (EJIL Talk!).  "Historic Dispute Over ‘Unitary Executive’ Advances in Trump Era"--a very full and thoughtful explainer (CT Examiner).  

--Dan Ernst 

Ramdas et al. on the Diffusion of Constitutions

Tejas Ramdas, Cornell University; Patrick Chung-Chia Huang, National Taiwan University College of Law; Nuno Garoupa. George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School; Martin T. Wells, Cornell Law School, Yun-chien Chang, Cornell Law School, and Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago Law School, have posted The Genesis of Constitutions: A Natural Language Processing Approach:

The diffusion of constitutional ideas and models has been the subject of extensive scholarship. In this paper, we use natural language processing methods to examine the persistence of constitutional ideas and models, focusing on how 16 core and iconic constitutions influence 572 newer constitutions over a long period (1900-2020). Our findings indicate that "old" core constitutions (such as those of the U.S. of 1789, Spain of 1812, France of 1848, and to a lesser extent France of 1791) have maintained significant influence over those 121 years. Austria of 1920 and France of 1946 are the most influential among the 20th-century iconic constitutions. In line with previous research, these old "core" constitutions experienced a sustainable decline in their impact from the early 1900s to World War II. However, remarkably, their formal influence tended to stabilize after the 1950s. Notably, the influence of the U.S. Constitution of 1789 and the French Constitution of 1848 never fully disappeared. The persistent impact of these older constitutions indicates a certain institutional inertia that shapes legal orders to this day.

--Dan Ernst

An Exhibit and Conference on German Constitutional History

We have word of a library exhibit and panel at the Washington & Lee University School of Law: Locating the Law: Places of German Constitutional History.  First, the exhibit, which runs from September 4 – October 31, 2025:

Locating the Law explores the places where Germany’s constitutional identity has taken shape—from medieval cathedrals and Enlightenment-era town halls to postwar courthouses and modern office buildings. Featuring photographs by Alexander Telesniuk and adapted from the book Verfassungorte/Constitutional Places by Russell A. Miller, Markus Lang, and Kai-Michael Sprenger, the exhibition considers how democracy is rooted not just in texts but in physical spaces and shared public memory.

Spanning over five centuries, the exhibition highlights sites where constitutions were debated, drafted, or defended. Telesniuk’s images reflect the symbolic and practical importance of these locations, reminding viewers that building and maintaining a constitutional society is a collective, ongoing effort. The project builds on an original book project funded and published by Stiftung Orte der deutschen Demokratiegeschichte (The Foundation for the Places of the History of German Democracy).

The panel discussion is Wednesday October 22, 2025, 4:00–5:30 pm in Lykes Atrium, with a light reception following.  The panelists are:

Alexander Telesniuk, Constitutional Places Photographer, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Russell Miller, Co-author of Constitutional Places, W&L University School of Law
Kish Parella, W&L University School of Law
Richard Wetzell, German Historical Institute, Washington DC 

--Dan Ernst 

Native Peoples, American Colonialism, and the US Constitution

[We have the following announcement from the Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History at the New York Historical, which is not to be confused with the  Institute for Constitutional Studies at the George Washington University Law School.  DRE.]

The Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is pleased to announce its fall 2025 seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty, Native Peoples, American Colonialism, and the US Constitution. 

Description.  As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this seminar invites a critical examination of a central paradox in American constitutional history: how can a nation celebrate a founding document and constitutional tradition built, in part, on the dispossession of Indigenous homelands? 

From the Founders’ long-standing relationships with Native nations to the grievances lodged regarding ‘merciless Indian savages’ into the Declaration, Indian affairs and westward expansion were foundational to the creation and evolution of the US Constitution.  The Northwest Ordinance laid the “blueprint for empire” for federal imperial expansion from thirteen states clinging to the Eastern seaboard to a nation that stretched “from sea to shining sea,” while the United States Constitution excluded “Indians not taxed” from American polity—in so doing, also codifying the specific subordination of a people by name within constitutional text. 

Despite this deep entanglement, Native history remains marginalized within the fields of constitutional history and mainstream constitutional scholarship.  This seminar explores emerging historical and legal literature that re-centers Native peoples and American colonialism in the narrative of US constitutional development.  Topics include the role of Native peoples and “Indian affairs” in the Constitution’s initial drafting and ratification and the legal architecture of colonial expansion.  The seminar will also explore how centering Native peoples allows for a rethinking of United States constitutional history and American public law more broadly.

Logistics.  The seminar meets at the New York Historical, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024, and via Zoom,* on the following dates:

    Friday, November 7, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET
    Friday, November 21, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET
    Friday, December 5, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET
    Friday, December 12, 2025 | 11 am–2 pm ET

*Although we encourage students to attend the class in person, livestream participation will be offered to admitted students who do not live in the New York Metropolitan Area or who are unable to attend a class in person. If you are interested in attending some or all of the class sessions virtually, please indicate this in your application statement.

Accepted students will receive further instructions and the classroom location within The New York Historical.  There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own.

Instructors.  Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is a professor of law at NYU whose work explores the relationship between law and power, with a focus on how subordinated peoples leverage legal tools—often beyond rights and courts—to shift power to their communities.  Her scholarship appears in leading journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Supreme Court Review, American Historical Review, Journal of Politics, among others.  Her recent projects, including the Foreword The Constitution of American Colonialism, investigate how the American colonial project, including the resistance and advocacy of Native and other colonized peoples, shaped U.S. constitutional law and history.  She is currently at work on two book projects that examine American colonialism, the field of “colonial administration,” and its boomerang effects.

Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Band of Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History at Yale University.  He is a historian of Native America and federal Indian law, as well as a scholar of violence and state formation, particularly in the American West.  He is the author of several books and/or co-edited works, including the recent Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, which took home the National Book Award, among numerous other prizes.  His recent writings can be found in The Boston Globe and The Atlantic (forthcoming), and draw upon his current research on the American Revolution and the many challenges that it brought to Native American communities in the 18th-century world.

Application Process.  The seminar is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. All participants will be expected to complete the assigned readings and participate in seminar discussions. Although the Institute cannot offer academic credit directly for the seminar, students may be able to earn graduate credit through their home departments by completing an independent research project in conjunction with the seminar. Please consult with your advisor and/or director of graduate studies about these possibilities.

Space is limited. To apply, please submit the following material to ich@nyhistory.org by October 10, 2025: (1) Your C.V.; and (2) a short statement on how this seminar will be useful to you in your research, teaching, or professional development.

Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter. For further information, please email Andrew Fletcher at ich@nyhistory.org.

Leading Works in the History of the Constitution

Chris Monaghan, a Principal Lecturer in Law at the University of Worcester, has published the edited collection, Leading Works in the History of the Constitution (Routledge):

 This collection brings together academic analysis of leading contemporary accounts of the British Constitution with key constitutional documents and sources, while also offering analysis of the leading histories of the Constitution.

The works in question represent examples of the constitutionally most significant legislation, judicial decisions, and commentaries by scholars and key actors. Its scope is the seven hundred years of English, and then British, history from the Magna Carta to Britain as an imperial power grappling with the question of how to govern India.

The contributors, presenting a balance of established academics and early career researchers, present an original and succinct account of the significance of each leading work. They draw upon the context in which it was written, contemporary literature and more modern academic analysis of the work and its author(s).

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

ICS Seminar: Constitutional Controversies

[We are moving up this post, because the August 30 deadline is one month away.  DRE]

The Institute for Constitutional Studies is pleased to announce another seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty: Constitutional Controversies: A Historical Survey.  

This seven-session seminar looks at constitutional controversies from a historical perspective. Guided by legal historians, we will explore disputes and debates over “rights” driving modern-day politics. Americans frequently turn to the courts – and to the Constitution – to resolve their political, social, and ideological disagreements about issues like privacy, equality, abortion, gun control, property rights, religion, etc. Yet, this is hardly a new phenomenon. Disputes about the interpretation and applicability of the Constitution have been central throughout our nation’s history. Since the Philadelphia Convention, constitutional controversies have defined persons included (or not) among “We the People” and rights included (or not) among “the Blessings of Liberty.” This discussion-based reading group will proceed chronologically through a series of “constitutional moments.” Among the historical controversies to be covered are the origins of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, judicial review, slavery, the Reconstruction Amendments, free speech, desegregation, affirmative action, and voting rights. We will also consider the role that “history” and “tradition” have played in recent judicial decisions involving abortion, gun rights, and presidential immunity.

 Instructors

Maeva Marcus, a past president of the American Society for Legal History, is Research Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Constitutional Studies at the George Washington University Law School. She serves as the general editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States. Author of Truman and the Steel Seizure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power, she also edited the eight-volume series The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800 and Origins of the Federal Judiciary: Essays on the Judiciary Act of 1789.

Steven Steinbach, GWU Professorial Lecturer in Law, taught United States History and American Government courses and served as History Department Chair at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Previously he was a partner in the Washington, DC, law firm of Williams & Connolly LLP, where he specialized in criminal and civil litigation.

Logistics

Monday evenings, 6-8 pm, September 8, 15, 29; October 6, 13, 20 and 27, 2025.  The seminar will meet at the George Washington University Law School, 2000 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20052. The classroom is Burns 415.

 Application Process

The seminar is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. All participants will be expected to complete the assigned readings and participate in seminar discussions. Although the Institute cannot offer academic credit directly for the seminar, students may be able to earn graduate credit through their home departments by completing an independent research project in conjunction with the seminar. Please consult with your advisor and/or director of graduate studies about these possibilities. Space is limited, so applicants should send a copy of their curriculum vitae and a short statement on how this seminar will be useful to them in their research, teaching, or professional development. Materials will be accepted only by email at icsgw@law.gwu.edu until August 30, 2025. Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter. For further information, please contact Maeva Marcus at maevamarcus@law.gwu.edu.

Additional Information

There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own.

About ICS

The Institute for Constitutional Studies (ICS) is the nation’s premier institute dedicated to ensuring that future generations of Americans understand the substance and historical development of the U.S. Constitution.  Begun with the assistance of a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute is located at the George Washington University Law School.  To fulfill its mission, the Institute’s seminars explore the important role the Constitution has played in shaping American society.

Weekend Roundup

• The University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative (SDRI) has put together an amazing resource on state constitutions, the 50 Constitutions project, which it continues to update. Of particular interest: the "Tracking Constitutional Change" feature. This feature "allow[s] users to see how [constitutions] have taken shape over time and to learn about important historical moments." Nine states so far "have full Tracking Constitutional Change capabilities," including the just-added Pennsylvania. SDRI reports that "[m]ore states will be added in the coming year."   

• Katrina Jagodinsky, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will present in the Monday Seminar of the Department of History of Johns Hopkins University on September 22, from 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm. 

• 

  Children Gathering Wildflowers above Trondhjem (LC)

  Elin Hofverberg on "110 Years of the Norwegian Castbergian Child Laws" (In Custodia Legis).
  

• Zachary S. Price, UC San Francisco Law, on “Trumpian Impoundments in Historical Perspective” (SLR).

• "Durham Cathedral has unveiled a new exhibition featuring three versions of Magna Carta, the historical charter that first established the Rule of Law"  (Palatinate). 

• The historian of administrative state Joy Milligan has moved from Virginia Law to UC Berkeley Law (UC Berkeley Law). 

• Justice Stephen Breyer, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, and Michael Klarman on taking the bar--or not (Harvard Law Today). 

• Thanks to Liz Sepper (UT-Austin), the talk of law professor Bluesky is the painting "Supreme Court Beach." Jay Willis at "Balls & Strikes" did a deep dive on the painting's history -- including which former Justice owns the original. [KMT] 

• The latest "SCOTUS Scoop" from the Supreme Court Historical Society is Still at Work: How the Justices Spend Their Summer Months.  But we thought they were at the beach!

• For over 30 years, Daytonites "have put on a play every July using the trial transcript" form the Scope Monkey Trial.  "Destiny in Dayton" explains "the complexities of the town captured by history" (Akron Legal News).  Also, the ABAJ looks "back at the Scopes trial 100 years later." 

• Upcoming book talks in the America's Town Hall series of the National Constitution Center include Akhil Reed Amar on Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 (September 16) and Eric Foner on Our Fragile Freedoms (September 24).  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Weekend Roundup

• Penn Law's notice of Serena Mayeri's new book, Marital Privilege.  

• BC Law's notice of Aziz Rana's receipt of the annual book prize of the Society for US Intellectual History for The Constitutional Bind. 

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has a series of short videos, Breaking History, based on recent or forthcoming content in the Journal of Supreme Court History.   Helen J. Knowles-Gardner discusses "Without a Little Help from Your Friends: The Supreme Court's Rejection of the American Jewish Congress Amicus Brief in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson (1958)" and Jonathan Lurie discusses his forthcoming review of Robert C. Post’s new contribution to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History. 

• Asheesh Kapur Siddique, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, on "the long history of governments attempting to restrict access to documents about their inner workings" (HNN).

• Katherine Gregory, Mississippi State University, on the threat funding cuts pose to political archives deposited in state universities (The Conversation).  

• Over at Balkinization: a symposium has begun on Richard Primus's The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power. Look out for contributions from Will Baude (Chicago), William Ewald (Penn), Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford), Abbe Gluck (Yale), Sandy Levinson (Texas), John Mikhail (Georgetown), and Christina Ponsa-Kraus (Columbia). 

• "Tulane Law Students Explore the Origins of Maritime Law in Greece" (Tulane Law). 

• "Quentin Skinner responds to a wide range of questions centred primarily on the arguments of his Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (2025) (GIH). 

• Time's Made by History:  Crushing Dissent is as American as Protest Itself by Shira Lurie.   The Founders Knew Great Wealth Inequality Could Destroy Us by Daniel Mandell.  Why American Revolutionaries Fought to Protect Habeas Corpus by Zara Anishanslin.  Inherit the Wind and the Scopes Trial in Memory by Charlotte M. Canning. 

• The Jacksonville University College of Law is hosting “250 Years of Independence: Fortifying America’s Commitment to Democracy for All," a traveling exhibit curated by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress (Florida Bar). 

• At the American Prospect: Joseph A. McCartin (Georgetown University), "Requiem for the Wagner Act" (h/t: Bunk)

• ICYMI: The decline of postliberalism (Vox). Michael Kazin on the Scopes Trial at 100 (NYT). Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern ask, "Can Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Take on History Be a Corrective to Amy Coney Barrett’s?" (Slate).  Gerard N. Magliocca on Robert Jackson's Youngstown concurrence as "the Greatest 'No Kings' Essay in History" (Slate).  The Harvard law faculty's summer reads. John Yoo on Richard Epstein on the original understanding of the war powers (AEI).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Bilder on Distinguishing Instrument and Constitution

Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, The Character of the Constitution: Instrument and Constitution, which is forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities:

What was the character of the Constitution in the framing period? Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic did more to interest people in that question that perhaps any other single twentieth-century book. And yet we still struggle to answer the question. In fact, we stumble over what we even mean by constitution. In this brief essay, I distinguish two words: instrument and constitution. These two words illuminate the character of the Constitution in the framing era. They were long used by the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution. The productive ambiguity produced by this disambiguation is a central aspect of the American system Wood praised as "political theory worthy of a prominent place" in the history of political thought.

--Dan Ernst

Constitutional Meaning in the Shadow of the Articles of Confederation

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

On Monday, May 12, the Brennan Center for Justice and the National Constitution Center present a symposium exploring how the Articles of Confederation shaped the U.S. Constitution. Historians, legal scholars, and journalists . . .will examine the legacy of the Articles of Confederation, the founding debates over federal power, and the lasting influence of these debates on constitutional interpretation today.  Free in person and online.

11-11:15 a.m. | Introductory Remarks

Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO, National Constitution Center
Michael Waldman, president and CEO, Brennan Center for Justice

11:15 a.m.–12:30 p.m. | Panel 1: The Articles of Confederation

Explore the origins of the Articles of Confederation—examining the political, practical, and ideological reasons behind the states' sovereignty—and how the “firm league of friendship” among the 13 states ultimately became unworkable.

Aditya Bamzai, Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Johann Neem, professor of history, Western Washington University
Farah Peterson, professor of law, University of Chicago Law School
Jack Rakove, Coe Professor of History and American Studies, professor of political science emeritus, Stanford University
Moderator: Alicia Bannon, director of the Brennan Center Judiciary Program

12:30–1:15 p.m. | Lunchtime Keynote

1:15–2:30 p.m. | Panel 2: Debating the Constitution 

Examine the reasons for the Constitution’s plan of government, how it was understood at the time, and how concerns over its failings were addressed through ideological debates at the Constitutional Convention.

Jay Cost, Gerald R. Ford Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Jonathan Gienapp, associate professor of history, associate professor of law, Stanford University
Kermit Roosevelt, David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

2:45–4 p.m. | Panel 3: The War Over the Constitution’s Meaning

Explore governance under the new Constitution and the Articles’ long shadow, from the early republic to the post–New Deal modern era, and how competing narratives of the Constitution’s origin story evolved.

Ilya Somin, professor of law, Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University
Alan Trammell, associate professor of law, Washington and Lee University School of Law
Moderator: Wilfred U. Codrington III, Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; fellow, Brennan Center

4–4:15 p.m. | Closing Reflections

Fitzsimmons on the French Constitution of 1791

Michael P. Fitzsimmons has published The Forgotten Constitution: The Origins, Realization, and Legacy of the French Constitution of 1791 (Oxford University Press):

The French Constitution of 1791 has a major legacy that overturned many centuries of historical tradition but remains little known outside of France. It ratified the unprecedented transformation of a society based on monarchy-centered government and legal privilege to one based on a sovereign citizenry and legal equality. Its powerful impact served as the inspiration for the wave of constitution-making that engulfed Europe during the nineteenth century and expanded globally thereafter. Furthermore, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as its original preamble, the Constitution of 1791 is associated with the concept of human rights proclaimed by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Drawing on wide-ranging and long-overlooked manuscript sources, The Forgotten Constitution highlights the Constitution of 1791's underappreciated importance and influence in the world. The constitution was the product of a long-term crisis of the Bourbon monarchy grounded in fears of despotism. The idea of a constitution took hold during the 1780s as the means to stabilize the kingdom through a more equitable distribution of power while attempting to accommodate a king. By making a constitution a compact between monarch and people, by its written assurance of civic and natural rights, and by its assertion of legal equality as an essential element of political legitimacy, the Constitution of 1791 codified the principles of the French Revolution. This book shows how it was the French constitutional tradition, inspired by the Constitution of 1791, that drove the Western constitutional ideal, especially in the revolutions of 1848.

--Dan Ernst

Jia on Constitutional Education in China and the US

My Georgetown Law colleague Mark Jia has posted The Possibilities of Constitutional Education:

Constitutional scholarship has traditionally focused on formal constitutional actors: courts, legislatures, and executives. These actors are often regarded as primary sources of constitutional law, or in some cases, as final arbiters of constitutional meaning. More peripheral in this literature are actors thought to transmit what courts and high officials have established. These constitutional educators, including law professors, legal journalists, and civics planners, are often overlooked for defensible reasons: they lack the normative authorities of formal institutional actors, and they do not exercise power as it is often understood in public law.

This Article advances a general theory of constitutional education to show what is possible through centering the output of constitutional educators. In an age of global constitutional change and local constitutional upheaval, constitutional education can shed light on basic questions of constitutional order. The analytic value of constitutional education lies not in studying it in isolation, but from examining how primary constitutional research subjects—texts, ideas, methods, decisions, and reasons—are refracted through a distinct set of downstream epistemic actors. Focusing on two case studies, the United States and China, the Article shows how the study of constitutional education can illuminate the functions of authoritarian constitutions, the construction of constitutional culture, and the dynamics of constitutional change. In so arguing, the Article also suggests that certain constitutional patterns may transcend divisions between autocracy and democracy, constitutions and constitutionalism.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Jonathan Gienapp continues his engagement with "original public meaning" originalists.  "[O]riginalists assume that historians’ primary contribution is that they know that something happened or that a word had a certain meaning in the past," he writes. "Historians, meanwhile, tend to believe that their principal skill is in knowing how to decode historical utterances in all their guises. The knowing that is thus built on the knowing how, or, better put, the knowhow" (Process).

• 

  Raulston,J., charges the Scopes Trial jury (NYPL).

  On March 20-21, the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania will host a hybrid event on "The Scopes Trial at 100: Secularism, Race, and Education." More information is available here. 
  

• Edward Larson will deliver the Palmer Hotz Endowed Lecture in the History of Science on the Scopes Trial at the University of Arkansas at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, March 6, in the Gearhart Auditorium.
  

• The Supreme Court Historical Society lecture, "The Life and Times of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth," by William R. Casto will be held at 12:00 PM (EST) on February 24, 2025, via Zoom.  The Society will subsequently post a recording on its YouTube channel.  Register here.
  

• At the next meeting of the Helsinki Legal History Series seminar, on February 25 and conducted over Zoom, Susanne K. Paas of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, will speak on “Josef Esser: A German Jurist in Four Systems.”  More.

• At the next online meeting of the Environment, Law, and History Global Workshop, Benjamin Richardson, University of Tasmania Faculty of Law, will present the previously circulated paper, “Conservation Covenants in Castlecrag, Sydney: Walter Burley and Marion Griffin’s Legal Innovation in the Interbellum.”  Carol Rose will comment.  The session will take place on March 27 at 9 pm UTC.  (Convert to your time zone, if necessary, here.)(H-Law).
  

• "Christian, Jewish, Islamic & Secular Law in American & International History," a Zoom panel, will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 3:30 EST. Panelists include Deina Abdelkader, David Novak, Peter N. Stearns, and R. Charles Weller.  Register here  (H-Law).
  

• Five top public law scholars have responded to the Barnett/Wurman NYT op-ed on birthright citizenship (Just Security).  And Jonathan Schaub, after reviewing the exchange, adds an argument based on expatriation (Lawfare).
  

• Mark Tushnet, Stephen Skowronek, and John A. Dearborn discuss “the destruction of the public service” on the Scholars’ Circle podcast.
  

• ICYMI, State Constitutional History Edition: The New Hampshire Department of Education has launched a series of digital resources on the New Hampshire Constitution (Discovery).  Also, "Iowa's unique civil rights history must be taught, not suppressed" (Des Moines Register).  The inalienable rights clause of the North Dakota Constitution figures in a reproductive rights brief files by the Constitutional Accountability Center (CRR).  Teaching Americanism in New York classrooms, 1919-1922 (New York Almanack).  
  

• Karin Wulf on "Abigail Kimball's law book...1785" in Princeton's Lapidus Collection (BlueSky).

• ICYMI: The Charter of the Forest of 1225, the Magna Carta of 1215, and the Forest Charter of 1217 are on display at Lincoln Castle until June 1, 2025 (Lincolnshire Today).  A new library at Adams State University will preserve "the water, land and cultural history of the Upper Rio Grande River Basin" (KRCC). Vittorio Bufacchi's short history of separation of powers (The Conversation).  The six sentences George Washington cut from his farewell address (Slate). 
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers