We ought to have noted sooner the publication by
Gerald Leonard, Boston University and
Saul Cornell, Fordham University, of
The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s-1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which appears in the series
New Histories of American Law, edited by Christopher L. Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley and Michael Grossberg, Indiana University:
The Partisan Republic is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. The book focuses on the decline of the Founding generation's elitist vision of the Constitution and the rise of a more 'democratic' vision premised on the exclusion of women and non-whites. It incorporates recent scholarship on topics ranging from judicial review to popular constitutionalism to place judicial initiatives like Marbury vs Madison in a broader, socio-legal context. The book recognizes the role of constitutional outsiders as agents in shaping the law, making figures such as the Whiskey Rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, and James Forten part of a cast of characters that has traditionally been limited to white, male elites such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall. Finally, it shows how the 'democratic' political party came to supplant the Supreme Court as the nation's preeminent constitutional institution.
The book has been the subject of
an excellent symposium over at Balkinization, with assessments by Greg Ablavsky (Stanford), Mary Bilder (Boston College), Jud Campbell (Richmond), Johnathan Gienapp (Stanford), Mark Graber (Maryland), Mark Killenbeck (Arkansas), and Sandy Levinson (Texas) and responses by the authors. Cornell discusses the book on the
New Books in History podcast.
--Dan Ernst
