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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Case Of The Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris And The Creation Of The Federalist Constitution, William Michael Treanor
The Case Of The Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris And The Creation Of The Federalist Constitution, William Michael Treanor
Michigan Law Review
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 …
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 …