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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Constitutional Structure, Institutional Relationships And Text: Revisiting Charles Black's White Lectures, Richard C. Boldt
Constitutional Structure, Institutional Relationships And Text: Revisiting Charles Black's White Lectures, Richard C. Boldt
Faculty Scholarship
Fundamental questions about constitutional interpretation and meaning invite a close examination of the complicated origins and the subsequent elaboration of the very structure of federalism. The available records of the Proceedings in the Federal Convention make clear that the Framers entertained two approaches to delineating the powers of the central government relative to those retained by the states. The competing approaches, one reliant on a formalist enumeration of permissible powers, the other operating functionally on the basis of a broad dynamic concept of state incompetence and national interest, often are presented as mutually inconsistent narratives. In fact, these two approaches …
Slavery's Constitution: Rethinking The Federal Consensus, Maeve Glass
Slavery's Constitution: Rethinking The Federal Consensus, Maeve Glass
Faculty Scholarship
For at least half a century, scholars of the early American Constitution have noted the archival prominence of a doctrine known as the “federal consensus.” This doctrine instructed that Congress had no power to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it existed. Despite its ubiquity in the records, our understanding of how and why this doctrine emerged is hazy at best. Working from a conceptual map of America’s founding that features thirteen local governments coalescing into two feuding sections of North and South, commentators have tended to explain the federal consensus either as a vestige of …