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America's Unknown Constitutional World, Christian G. Fritz
America's Unknown Constitutional World, Christian G. Fritz
Faculty Scholarship
Historical and popular understandings of the American constitutional tradition have adopted the contentions of only one side of this debate and its role in bringing about the 1787 constitution. In doing so, these accounts miss much of that tradition’s actual history.
Recovering The Lost Worlds Of America's Written Constitutions, Christian G. Fritz
Recovering The Lost Worlds Of America's Written Constitutions, Christian G. Fritz
Faculty Scholarship
Recovering the Lost Worlds of America's Written Constitutions,' originating as the sixth Brennan Lecture delivered at Oklahoma City University Law School on November 7, 2002, explores the transformation of the right of revolution in the wake of the American Revolution. The significance of displacing the singular sovereign in the person of the king with the collective sovereign of 'the people,' gave rise to constitutional understandings that are at odds with today's constitutionalism that emphasizes the necessity of procedural regularity to effect legitimate constitutional revision. The article explores how 'circumvention' of such procedures was consistent with an earlier concept of the …
Fallacies Of American Constitutionalism, Christian G. Fritz
Fallacies Of American Constitutionalism, Christian G. Fritz
Faculty Scholarship
Fallacies of American Constitutionalism' examines the pervasive assumptions in the scholarship of historians, lawyers, and political scientists that impute the central role of the federal Constitution to how Americans understood written constitutions after their Revolution. American struggles to come to grips with the meaning of the sovereignty of the people before and after 1787 reveals very different views about the people as the sovereign from those reflected in the federal Constitution and dispel the notion that our prevailing constitutional view is an unbroken chain stretching back to 1787.
American Constitution-Making: The Neglected State Constitutional Sources, Christian G. Fritz, Marsha L. Baum
American Constitution-Making: The Neglected State Constitutional Sources, Christian G. Fritz, Marsha L. Baum
Faculty Scholarship
American Constitution-Making: The Neglected State Constitutional Sources' looks at a frequently overlooked genre of literature pertinent to American constitution-making: comprehensive compilations of state constitutions that made their appearance from the first wave of constitution-making preceding (and following) the Federal constitution. Routinely issued in pocket-sized editions, the authors demonstrate the presence of these compilations in constitutional conventions and their use by constitution-makers from the Revolutionary period through the late 19th century. The significance of the process of 'borrowing' provisions from other state constitutions is placed in a new and different light that raises intriguing questions about the level of American awareness, …