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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Federalist Constitution: Foreword, David S. Schwartz, Jonathan Gienapp, John Mikhail, Richard A. Primus
The Federalist Constitution: Foreword, David S. Schwartz, Jonathan Gienapp, John Mikhail, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Over the past twenty years, constitutional law has taken a decidedly historical turn, both in academia and in the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions are increasingly filled with extended historical inquiries, and not just by self-described originalists. Yet much of this historical inquiry is severely distorted. Twenty-first-century lawyers and judges enjoy improved and ever-widening access to a rich array of primary sources from the founding era and the early republic, but the ability of modern interpreters to make sense of these materials is pervasively affected by present biases. Many of these biases stem directly from long-standing received narratives …
Originalism From The Soft Southern Strategy To The New Right: The Constitutional Politics Of Sam Ervin Jr, Logan E. Sawyer Iii
Originalism From The Soft Southern Strategy To The New Right: The Constitutional Politics Of Sam Ervin Jr, Logan E. Sawyer Iii
Scholarly Works
Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other …
The Case Of The Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris And The Creation Of The Federalist Constitution, William M. Treanor
The Case Of The Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris And The Creation Of The Federalist Constitution, William M. Treanor
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
At the end of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates appointed the Committee of Style and Arrangement to bring together the textual provisions that the Convention had previously agreed to and to prepare a final constitution. Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris drafted the document for the Committee, and, with few revisions and little debate, the Convention adopted Morris’s draft. For more than two hundred years, questions have been raised as to whether Morris covertly altered the text in order to advance his constitutional vision, but modern legal scholars and historians studying the Convention have either ignored the issue or concluded that Morris …