To inform New Yorkers in advance of next month’s referendum on whether to convene a state constitutional convention, the Historical Society of the New York Courts has posted on its website A Global Context: The New York State Constitutional Convention of 1938, by Peter J. Galie, emeritus professor of history at Canisius College, and Christopher Bopst. An expanded version appeared in New York Archives Magazine 17 (Summer 2017): 24-27. The 1938 convention's adoption of an “antibureaucracy clause” figures in chapter 4 of my Tocqueville’s Nightmare.
Update: By a large margin New Yorkers voted not to convene a constitutional convention.
