Originalism, the notion that judges should interpret the Constitution according to the meaning it had at the time it was ratified, is usually associated with expanding executive power. I suggest, however, that the opposite is true: originalism means limiting executive power. If we interpret the Constitution as understood at the time it was created, the question is: What was in the collective mind of the Colonists when they wrote and ratified the Constitution? To answer that question, I return to “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America”—Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers: with some reflections on the resistance made to King Charles. In this sermon, read as John Adams says, “by everybody,” Mayhew, thoroughly schooled in Republican thought and English constitutionalism, proposed that “unlimited submission” does not exist, and that the monarch’s powers are always limited. I conclude by drawing parallels between Mayhew’s descriptions of Charles I’s crimes and President Donald Trump’s actions since his second election.

Thomas Jefferson once described America's new religious freedom guarantees as a ‘fair’ and ‘novel experiment’.1 These guarantees, set out in the new American state and federal constitutions of 1776 to 1791, defied the millennium-old assumptions inherited from Western Europe: that one form of Christianity must be established in a community and that the state must protect and support it against all other forms of faith. America would no longer suffer such governmental prescriptions and proscriptions of religion, Jefferson declared. All forms of Christianity had to stand on their own feet and on an equal footing with all other religions. Their survival and growth had to turn on the cogency of their word, not the coercion of the sword, and on the faith of their members, not the force of the law.

This review article discusses Rosalind Rosenberg’s study of Pauli Murray’s pivotal role in enhancing the civil rights of African Americans and American women. Pauli Murray should be properly regarded as one of the leading legal thinkers of Twentieth-Century America. She played a role in the development of the jurisprudential thinking, which brought about an end to race discrimination as enshrined in the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine in the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and ending sex discrimination beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Reed v. Reed. The objective of this review article is to provide an account of her approach to attacking both legally based race and sex discrimination. Drawing on Rosenberg and referencing key legal texts, it begins with a brief account of Murray’s life and times. This is followed by an examination of her thinking on both race and sex discrimination. The review concludes by commending Rosenberg for her analysis of the intersections between the private and public personas of Pauli Murray in a century which witnessed fundamental changes in America.