Brown on Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury and the Pennsylvania Council of Censors

This is gated but extremely interesting.  Angus Harwood Brown has published Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury, the Pennsylvania Council of Censors, and the Debate on the Conservative Power in the French Revolution in the Journal of the History of Ideas 85 (July 2024): 479-508:

Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (wiki)

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s 1795 proposal for a Constitutional Jury is usually portrayed as the first proposal for an institution to control the constitutionality of laws, and thus the ancestor of the modern constitutional court. Challenging this view, this article resituates the Constitutional Jury in a broader transatlantic tradition concerned with creating a conservative power, a non-judicial and explicitly political constitutional guardian, and demonstrates the influence of the 1776 Pennsylvania Council of Censors on Sieyès’s Constitutional Jury. Drawing upon the insights provided by this tradition, it then reevaluates the history of constitutionalism and the contemporary crisis of constitutional guardianship.

--Dan Ernst