The Limits of History: The English Fire Courts, Congress, and the Seventh Amendment Civil Jury Trial
Thanks to James Oldham and Robin Kar for conversations about the fire courts.
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For feedback and suggestions at various stages of this project, I thank David Barron, Mary Sarah Bilder, Nikolas Bowie, Richard Chen, Noah Feldman, Idriss Fofana, Barry Friedman, Jack Goldsmith, Daniel Hulsebosch, Mark Jia, Michael Klarman, Chris Mirasola, and Susannah Barton Tobin. This project also benefitted from workshops with faculty at Boston College Law School, University of Chicago Law School, Cornell Law School, Harvard Law School, Loyola Law School, New York University School of Law, Notre Dame Law School, University of San Diego School of Law, Seattle University School of Law, University of Texas School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, and Washington University School of Law. I am also grateful to Emma Svoboda and Elaine Tsui for research assistance and to the members of the University of Chicago Law Review for their hard work editing the manuscript.
This Article by Marco Basile argues that U.S. constitutional law and international law diverged after the Civil War when courts came to apply them differently against the state as the United States consolidated a continental nation-state. On one hand, the Supreme Court came to assert authority over constitutional law more aggressively in the context of gutting Reconstruction in the South. At the same time, the Court stepped back from international law in deference to Congress as the United States conquered territories and peoples in the West. The simultaneous rise of judicial supremacy as to constitutional law and of judicial deference as to international law recast constitutional law as more “legal” than political and international law as more “political” than legal. By recovering the earlier understanding of public law, this Article challenges how we construct constitutional traditions from the past. The Article ultimately invites us to reimagine a more integrated public law today.
Chen and Stulberg are completing a book on the history and development of race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.
For all of the legal and political contention surrounding affirmative action, one facet of the discussion is characterized by a curious, if implicit, consensus that spans all manner of ideological and partisan divisions.
I thank Candace Jackson Gray for her help in researching census and tax records connected to Chief Justice Marshall’s slaveholding, and Charles F. Hobson, Tim Huebner, Alysa Landry, and R. Kent Newmyer for their many comments on early versions of this piece. I thank Harvard University Press for allowing me to reprint material in this essay that comes from my book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (Harvard 2018).
This is the second Essay in a two-part series exploring Chief Justice John Marshall’s private and public relationship to slavery.