Hostname: page-component-65b85459fc-997vn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-18T13:54:21.300Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Method and Dialogue in History and Originalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

Logan Everett Sawyer III
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There is a sharp separation between the scholarly literature of originalists and professional historians. Originalists cite one another, but regularly ignore recent work by historians. Historians are generally happy to return the favor. Engagement between the two communities is too often limited to methodological disputes and amicus briefs. As a result, historical inquiry offers less to constitutional law than it might, and constitutional lawyers offer less to history than they could. Some of this separation is due to unavoidable methodological tension, but those tensions have not always frustrated productive dialogue. Originalism, in fact, emerged as an important theory of constitutional interpretation because of developments in professional historiography. Post-Revisionist approaches to the historiography of Reconstruction inspired and legitimated the book that set originalism on its current trajectory: Raoul Berger's Government by Judiciary. The revolution in the historiography of the founding embodied in Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic offered originalists other opportunities. It was not methodological disagreements but technological, institutional, and disciplinary developments since the 1980s that separated history and originalism. Those trends have mostly accelerated in the twenty-first century, but the role historians played in creating originalism suggests opportunities for productive dialogue still exist and should be pursued.

Information

Type
Invited Article
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 847 - 860
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

The author thanks Nathan Chapman, Saul Cornell, Cynthia Nicoletti, Peter Onuf, Laura Phillips Sawyer, and Matthew Steilen for critiques that significantly improved this article. The author also thanks Jonathan Gienapp, Bernadette Meyler, and Matthew Steilen for the opportunity to present a version of this article at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.

References

1. Originalists often cite a handful of works of history, most importantly Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969)Google Scholar. But Creation is 50 years old, and citations to recent work are scant. There are only a handful of citations to winners of the John Philip Reid Award, including Hulsebosch, Daniel J., Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Edling, Max M., A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Little-Griswold winners fare little better. Bilder, Mary Sarah, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar has been cited less than a half dozen times in law review articles advancing originalist arguments. Bilder's, Mary Sarah Beveridge Prize winning Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar has been lauded as a work of history by originalists, but largely discounted as being of little relevance. Solum, Lawrence B., “Triangulating Public Meaning: Corpus Linguistics, Immersion, and the Constitutional Record,” BYU Law Review 2017 (2017): 1621–82, at 1656–57Google Scholar. Solum, Lawrence B., “Intellectual History as Constitutional Theory,” Virginia Law Review 101 (2015): 1111–64Google Scholar, argues the methods of intellectual history are of limited use for originalists.

2. Cornell, Saul, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Constitutional Ideas: The Intellectual History Alternative to Originalism,” Fordham Law Review 82 (2013): 721–56Google Scholar.

3. Stein, Joshua, “Historians before the Bench: Friends of the Court, Foes of Originalism,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 25 (2013): 359–89Google Scholar.

4. Megill, Allan, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

5. Berger, Raoul, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, 1st ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

6. Wood, Creation.

7. O'Neill, Johnathan, Originalism in American Law and Politics: A Constitutional History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

8. Avins, Alfred, “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Intent,” Virginia Law Review 52 (1966): 1224–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bork, Robert, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal 47 (1971): 1–35Google Scholar; Ervin, Sam J., “The Role of the Supreme Court as the Interpreter of the Constitution,” Alabama Lawyer 26 (1965): 389–99Google Scholar; and Rehnquist, William, “The Notion of a Living Constitution,” University of Texas Law Review 54 (1976): 693–706Google Scholar.

9. Kersh, Ken I., “Ecumenicalism through Constitutionalism: The Discursive Development of Constitutional Conservatism in National Review, 1955–1980,” Studies in American Political Development 25 (2011): 86–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and O'Neill, Originalism, 111–32.

10. Berger, Government by Judiciary, 1st ed.

11. Whittington, Keith E., “The New Originalism,” Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy 2 (2004): 599Google Scholar; Kersh, “Ecumenicalism”; and O'Neill, Originalism, 111–32.

12. O'Neill, Originalism, 111–32. Compare with Sam Ervin Jr. and Alfred Avins who opposed Brown and the 1964 Civil Rights Act on originalist grounds. Avins, Alfred, “Racial Segregation in Public Accommodation,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 18 (1967): 1251–83Google Scholar; Avins, Alfred, “De Facto and de Jure School Segregation,” Mississippi Law Journal 32 (March 1967): 179–247Google Scholar; and Ervin, Sam J., “The United States Congress and Civil Rights Legislation,” North Carolina Law Review 42 (1963): 3–15Google Scholar.

13. Berger, , Government by Judiciary, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1997), 485–91Google Scholar.

14. Avins, “De Facto and de Jure School Segregation”; Avins, “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Intent”; and Bozell, L. Brent, The Warren Revolution: Reflections on the Consensus Society (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1966)Google Scholar.

15. Trefousse, Hans L., The Radical Republicans; Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York: Knopf, 1968)Google Scholar; LaWanda, and Cox, John H., “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics: The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography,” Journal of Southern History 33 (August 1967): 303–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, Willie Lee, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964)Google Scholar; McPherson, James M., The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; and Stampp, Kenneth M., The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York: Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar.

16. Graham, Howard Jay, Everyman's Constitution (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1968)Google Scholar; and TenBroek, Jacobus, Equal under Law (New York: Collier Books, 1965)Google Scholar.

17. Benedict, Michael Les, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974)Google Scholar; Donald, David Herbert, The Politics of Reconstruction, 1863–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Hyman, Harold Melvin, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York: Knopf, 1973)Google Scholar; and Paludan, Phillip S., A Covenant with Death: The Constitution, Law, and Equality in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

18. Berger, Government by Judiciary, 1st ed., 5.

19. Berger to Michael Les Benedict,” September 21, 1975, Box 1, Folder 5, Raoul Berger Papers, Harvard Law School Special Collections [hereafter Berger Papers].

20. Berger to Harold Hyman, February 2, 1976, Box 1, Folder 20, Berger Papers.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Kutler, Stanley I., “Raoul Berger's Fourteenth Amendment: A History or Ahistorical?” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 6 (1979): 511–26Google Scholar; and Soifer, Avaim, “Protecting Civil Rights: A Critique of Berger's History,” New York University Law Review 54 (1979): 651–706Google Scholar. In his notes on the manuscript of Government by Judiciary, Hyman told Berger that, “I want my JD students, who are working for history MAs and PhD's, to grapple with far more kinds of evidence than” you have examined. Hyman to Berger, March 3, 1976, Box 1, Folder 20, Berger Papers.

24. Hyman to Berger, March 3, 1976, Box 1, Folder 20, Berger Papers.

25. Willard Hurst to Berger, December 21, 1976, Box 1, Folder 19, Berger Papers.

26. Hurst to Berger, October 5, 1981, Box 1, Folder 19, Berger Papers.

27. Wood, Creation. Wood's approach, of course, was not unique. Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

28. Wood, Gordon S., “The Fundamentalists and the Constitution,” The New York Review of Books 35 (1988): 33–40Google Scholar.

29. Countryman, Edward, “Of Republicanism, Capitalism, and the ‘American Mind,’” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 556–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. “Ideology,” he wrote later, “creates behavior.” Wood, Gordon S., “Ideology and the Origins of Liberal America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (July 1987): 628–40, at 631CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Countryman, “Of Republicanism, Capitalism, and the ‘American Mind.’”

32. Hyman to Berger, March 3, 1976, Box 1, Folder 20, Berger Papers.

33. Berger to Hyman, April 6, 1976, Box 1, Folder 20, Berger Papers.

34. Ibid.

35. Rakove, Jack N., “Gordon S. Wood, the ‘Republican Synthesis,’ and the Path Not Taken,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 617–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Klarman, Michael J., The Framer's Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar, has recently re-emphasized those themes.

36. McConnell, Michael W., “Federalism: Evaluating the Founders’ Design (reviewing Federalism: The Founders’ Design by Raoul Berger),” University of Chicago Law Review 54 (1987): 1486Google Scholar.

37. Ibid., 1491–93, 1508, 1510.

38. Ibid., 1491–93, 1511.

39. Rakove, Jack N., Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1996)Google Scholar; Gienapp, Jonathan, “Historicism and Holism: Failures of Originalist Translation,” Fordham Law Review 84 (2015): 935–56Google Scholar. “We do not, and cannot, base our constitutional jurisprudence on the historical reality of the Founding,” said Wood, Wood in Gordon S. and Gerber, Scott D., “The Supreme Court and the Uses of History,” Ohio Northern Law Review 39 (2013): 448Google Scholar.

40. Other important developments are examined in Whittington, “The New Originalism,” and White, G. Edward, “The Arrival of History in Constitutional Law Scholarship,” Virginia Law Review 86 (2002): 485–633CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Wood, Gordon, “How Democratic is the Constitution?” New York Review of Books 53 (2006): 25–27Google Scholar. Work published within 5 years of Wood's comment include Edling, Max M., A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ferling, John, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Holton, Woody, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession That Led to the Constitution?” Journal of American History 92 (2005): 442–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Bloch, Ruth H., “The Constitution and Culture,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 550–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Main, Jackson Turner, “An Agenda for Research on the Origins and Nature of the Constitution of 1787–1788,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 591–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rakove, “Gordon S. Wood, the ‘Republican Synthesis,’ and the Path Not Taken.”

44. Bloch, “The Constitution and Culture”; Countryman, “Of Republicanism, Capitalism, and the ‘American Mind’”; and Diggins, John Patrick, “Between Bailyn and Beard: The Perspectives of Gordon S. Wood,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 563–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Howe, John, “Gordon S. Wood and the Analysis of Political Culture in the American Revolutionary Era,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 569–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Nash, Gary B., “Also there at the Creation: Going beyond Gordon S. Wood,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 602–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Ferling, A Leap in the Dark; and Holton, Woody, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007)Google Scholar.

48. Onuf, Peter S., The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

49. Cornell, Saul, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

50. Finkelman, Paul, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996)Google Scholar; Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,” The Journal of American History 79 (1992): 841–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nash, Gary B., Race and Revolution (Madison: Madison House, 1990)Google Scholar.

51. Wood, “Ideology and the Origins of Liberal America.”

52. Rakove, Original Meanings.

53. Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)Google Scholar.

54. Stanley, Amy Dru, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Wood, Creation; and Skinner, Quentin, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” Political Theory 2 (1974): 277–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Ball, Terence and Pocock, J.G.A., eds., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988)Google Scholar; Gienapp, “Historicism and Holism”; and Toews, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879–907CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. Solum, Lawrence B., “Originalism and Constitutional Construction,” Fordham Law Review 82 (2013): 453–538Google Scholar; Whittington, Keith, Constitutional Interpretation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001)Google Scholar; and Barnett, Randy, Restoring the Lost Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

58. Whittington, “The New Originalism.”

59. Gienapp, “Historicism and Holism.”

60. Solum, Lawrence B., “Originalist Methodology,” University of Chicago Law Review 84 (2017): 269–95Google Scholar.

61. Barnett, Randy E., “An Originalism for Nonoriginalists,” Loyola Law Review 45 (1999): 621–54Google Scholar.

62. Bilder, Madison's Hand; and Solum, “Triangulating Public Meaning,” 1656.

63. Storing, Herbert J., ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. National Historical Publications & Records Commission, Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/ (May 9, 2019).

65. Phillips, James C., Ortner, Daniel M., and Lee, Thomas R., “Corpus Linguistics & Original Public Meaning: A New Tool to Make Originalism More Empirical,” Yale Law Journal Forum 126 (2016)Google Scholar.

66. BYU Law, Law and Corpus Linguistics. https://lawcorpus.byu.edu/ (May 9, 2019).

67. Teles, Steven M., The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. Georgetown Law, Georgetown Center for the Constitution, Originalism Summer Seminar, 2019. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/constitution-center/originalism-summer-seminar/originalism-summer-seminar/ (May 9, 2019).

69. University of San Diego, School of Law, Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism, 2019. https://www.sandiego.edu/law/centers/csco/ (May 9, 2019).

70. Hollis-Brusky, Amanda, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

71. Solum, “Intellectual History as Constitutional Theory.”

72. Berger to Hyman, February, 1976, Box 1, Folder 20, Berger Papers.

73. Gienapp, “Historicism and Holism”; White, G. Edward, “Intellectual History and Constitutional Decision Making,” Virginia Law Review 101 (2015): 1165–78Google Scholar.

74. Balkin, Jack, Living Originalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Meyler, Bernadette, “Towards a Common Law Originalism,” Stanford Law Review 59 (2006): 551–600Google Scholar. At her confirmation hearing, Elena Kagan said that “sometimes [the Framers] laid down very specific rules. Sometimes they laid down broad principles. Either way we apply what they say, what they meant to do. So in that sense, we are all originalists.” The Nomination of Elena Kagan to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, Part 1, 111th Cong. 62 (2010).

75. Two examples are Ablavsky, Gregory, “‘With the Indian Tribes’: Race, Citizenship, and Original Constitutional Meanings,” Stanford Law Review 70 (2018): 1025–76Google Scholar; and LaCroix, Alison L., “The Interbellum Constitution: Federalism in the Long Founding Moment,” Stanford Law Review 67 (2015): 397–446Google Scholar.

76. Cornell, Saul “Originalism on Trial: The Use and Abuse of History in District of Columbia v. Heller,” Ohio State Law Journal 69 (2008): 625–40Google Scholar.