The central question of constitutional law is the role of the Supreme Court in our system of government. Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar’s America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By argues for a role even more …
Judicial Monarchs: Court Power and the Case for Restoring Popular Sovereignty in the United States might be placed alongside the recent tome by Justice Stephen Breyer, Making Our Democracy Work, each representing a strand of the two major ways …
In my previous post, I noted that the distinction between a tax and a regulation was well understood by the American revolutionaries. The distinction had to do with the purpose of the law. A tax was a law that …
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It was June 1793, a summer of discontent for the nascent opposition in Washington, and Thomas Jefferson had a problem: A political adversary in Virginia was rumored to be contemplating a run for the House of Representatives. Jefferson, concerned that …
We live under a Constitution of Affluence. Obviously, I don’t mean a constitution that produces affluence. (Prosperity may be right around the corner, but it’s the corner behind us.) I mean a Constitution whose basic institutions presuppose and depend on…
John Marshall’s opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden, I argued in an earlier post, is manifestly inconsistent with Justice Thomas’s textualist-originalist concurrence in Wyeth v. Levine. Only one of the decisions and opinions can be right on the …
I’m very grateful for Mike Ramsey’s forceful response at The Originalism Blog to my earlier post on the (alleged, by me) conflict between modern-day textualism-originalism and John Marshall’s jurisprudence, on the subject of preemption and beyond. I prolong this dispute …
Ratifying the U.S. Constitution in Virginia
The Philadelphia Convention rent Virginia’s political elite as no event ever had. Not only had Patrick Henry refused his proffered seat (he said he “smelt a rat”), but two of the three delegates who …
At the originalism blog, Mike Ramsey has a number of thoughtful posts on the Arizona immigration case and its central preemption question. His April 24 post rejects the contention that Arizona’s law is preempted because it “conflicts with the generalized …
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