The Interbellum Constitution by Alison L Lacroix

The Interbellum Constitution by Alison L Lacroix

A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision   Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity.   The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles—commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity—concerned what we now call “federalism,” meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today’s constitutional debates admit.   As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model—a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.

“No scholar is better equipped to challenge our understanding of the history of federalism than Alison LaCroixIn this pioneering study, she recovers the spirited, contingent, decades-long argument that shaped an era that most constitutional historians have dismissed as uneventful. Essential reading.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

“Alison LaCroix’s invaluable book is a fount of information and brilliant insights about a grievously neglected period of American constitutional development. It is often gripping in the stories it relates. This is truly essential reading.”—Sanford Levinson, author of An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century

“A brilliant, alternately rollicking and harrowing account of the law in action in the nineteenth-century United States. Prodigiously researched and bristling with startling revisionist arguments, this book is far and away the best account of the roiling world of American federalism in the crucial decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Interbellum Constitution carries urgent lessons for the emerging federal-state battles of our times.”—John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19

Alison L. LaCroix is Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law and Associate Member of the History Department at the University of Chicago. She served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and is the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780300223217
Titel	The Interbellum Constitution
Autor	Alison L Lacroix
Serie	Yale Law Library Series In Legal History And Reference
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Verlag	Yale University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2024-08-13
Seitenanzahl	576
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar