Roney on Citizenship and the Creation of the Federal Government

Jessica Choppin Roney, Temple University, has published “They Are Their Citizens and Must Submit to Their Government”: Citizenship and the Creation of the Federal Government, 1776–1787, online in Law and History Review  From the introduction:

The American War for Independence scrambled the concept of political allegiance and belonging. In James H. Kettner’s apt phrase, “subjects became citizens.” Where British law denied the possibility that a subject could renounce the obedience owed to their sovereign, Americans asserted through force of arms “the right to choose their allegiance.” Influenced by a contractual notion of political compact and by the mayhem of a violent civil war, people shuffled and sometimes reshuffled into camps of revolutionaries, loyalists, and neutrals.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

• Peter Shane explains how the US Supreme Court could preserve Humphrey's Executor, using the historically informed distinction advanced by Noah Rosenblum and Nathaniel Donahue in their amicus brief in Trump v. Slaughter (Washington Monthly).  (Professor Shane adds, in an email to a listserv, that he is "sadly confident [that this] will not be the actual outcome.") 

• The Federalist Society conference running in parallel with the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools next week includes a luncheon debate between Andrea Katz and Aditya Bamzai on the proposition, "Resolved: The President Has the Indefeasible Power of Removal"

• William Ewald joins Jesse Wegman of The New York Times to discuss Wegman’s new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution, under the auspices of the National Constitution Center, online at noon on Tuesday, January 20. 

• ICYMI: "After 1066, this medieval fine was imposed to deter anti-Norman violence" (History Extra).  "The Long History of Nativist Red-Baiting in the United States" (Jacobin).  In his annual report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts "hewed more closely to history" than in previous years (NYT).  In addition to Founding Era documents, he quoted Calvin Coolidge (SCOTUSblog).  Karin Wulf refers to the report, not, as CNN did, as "history-heavy" but as "history gestural." 

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