Law Commons^™

The Complexity Of American Federalism, Christian G. Fritz

Faculty Scholarship

For the Balkinization Symposium on Alison L. LaCroix, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press, 2024).

Alison LaCroix’s insightful new book, The Interbellum Constitution, builds on an often-overlooked fact: that Americans living before the Civil War did not know they were part of an “antebellum” period. That oversight has contributed to a conventional narrative of constitutional history and doctrine during the first half of the nineteenth-century that tends to read that history and doctrine backwards through the lens of a war that contemporaries did not know would define them. From this …

First Amendment Fetishism, John M. Kang

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court, starting in 1971, has lit upon a reckless path of protecting speech that is, by any reasonable measure, appallingly vulgar, emotionally hurtful, and dangerous. Against the wishes of the community, the Court has protected a roster of extremely offensive speech:

• a rageful repetition of the F-word uttered by a teacher before children in a school auditorium

• a White skinhead’s cross burning on the front lawn of a Black family’s house

• the public burning of the American flag by an avowed Communist who hated the United States and who cared nothing for the emotional pain …