Scholars familiar with James Wilson note the discrepancy between status accorded him by most constitutional historians and the magnitude of his contributions to our founding. Scholars familiar with the writings and career of James Wilson are struck by the discrepancy between the status accorded him by most constitutional historians and the magnitude of his contributions [...]
In sharp contrast to John Marshall’s elitist orientation—with its emphasis on the primacy of the national government, and restraint of the excesses of democracy—Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy was at once populistic and highly individualistic. Throughout the first decade of the American republic, competing claims regarding the proper interpretation of the Constitution and the application of its [...]
Certain features of the Constitution are almost invisible because they refer to previously existing institutions, constitutions, laws, and customs that are nowhere defined in the Constitution itself. The controversy over originalism-the question whether judges, in interpreting the Constitution, should be guided by the original intentions of the Framers or by some other standard-has generated a [...]
To be real, a Constitution must be lived, not honored in the breach. For without constitutional morality, there is no Constitution. And down that road, much hard experience already has taught us, lies tyranny. The Framers were acutely sensitive to the fears of many that a new federal government would erode the independence and authority [...]
The best way to understand the Constitutional Convention and the original intent of the Founders is not by studying The Federalist Papers, but by examining the various notes recorded by James Madison. For fifteen years now, I’ve had the rather grand and humbling privilege of teaching the entirety of the U.S. Constitution to freshmen each [...]
The Constitutional Convention debated the issue of slavery over almost a week. In the end, the delegates reluctantly agreed to allow slavery for the sake of South Carolina and Georgia. We moderns and post-moderns can debate all we want, but the case is that the Convention came very close to abolishing slavery. Its acceptance of [...]
Not only does the Supreme Court regularly overturn prior precedents, it has established rules for doing so. Here are eight reasons to overturn Roe v. Wade. With the Supreme Court's overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision, The Imaginative Conservative revisits some of its best essays on the topic of human life. With the widespread [...]
Russell Kirk wrote of the Constitution often, singing its praises as coming directly from the experience of a people. It was not written for any other, as it came into existence in a specific time and a specific place. To Kirk, the Constitution was a practical document, not an ideological or abstract one. Throughout his [...]
With America in great need of political and intellectual warriors to fight for our “Constitutional morality,” what better man to learn from as one prepares for battle than Willmoore Kendall. Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall, by Christopher H. Owen (256 pages, Lexington Books, 2021) More than 50 years after his death, [...]
Debate and battles over the health and vitality of our democracy are somewhat normal occurrences in our highly partisan political arena. But those debates and battles should not spill over into the constitutional realm, which serves as the steadying foundation for the U.S. political system. Over the past several years, a steady drumbeat of warnings [...]
Franklin Pierce’s suspicions reflected a tension within the antebellum Democratic Party in relation to slavery—how can we reconcile an advocacy of democratic decision-making with the existence of transcendent moral values, the Constitution with the Bible? On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which [...]
To the extent that James Madison’s democratic theory of "temporal republicanism" depends on time, the virtue on which it hinges is patience. If so, fundamental features of Madison’s democratic thought stand in tension with a twenty-first-century ethos of instant gratification and communication. Twelve-year-olds do not read Michel de Montaigne anymore, much less take notes. James [...]
The direction that constitutional practice has taken in the past hundred years shows that the Framers’ conception of republican government has passed and the era of populist democracy has arrived. The underlying transformation of the unwritten constitution renders efforts to return to the Framers’ original intent problematic. Much has been written in the past century [...]
Benjamin Harrison insisted America’s truly dangerous enemies were not Great Powers abroad but a lapse of integrity and purity at home. He believed republicanism would spread in the world by “sympathy and emulation” and feared the harm Americans might do to themselves and to others should they undertake to extend their institutions by force: “We [...]