I am pleased to announce that my article about Lysander Spooner and popular constitutionalism is forthcoming in Law and History Review. The article can be downloaded here: Download Knowles - LS and popular constitutionalism - Law and History Review final draft
Here is the abstract:
In recent years, the rise in academic interest in “popular constitutionalism” has been accompanied by scholarly efforts to identify examples from American history that support that movement’s normative claims about the ills of judicial supremacy. Should antislavery constitutionalists receive substantive discussion in this historical narrative? This article uses the writings of Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) (who authored the most extensive argument that slavery was unconstitutional) to demonstrate the complexities of answering this question. Nineteenth century abolitionists who wrote about the Constitution were constantly confronted with judges unwilling to act for liberty and justice. However, this did not result in an automatic acceptance of the need to issue a popular constitutionalist call to ‘take the Constitution away from the courts.’ Many, such as William Lloyd Garrison, adhered to an anti-constitutionalist position – advocating destruction of the nation’s supreme law. Lysander Spooner was no Garrisonian, but he also did not become a popular constitutionalist until the late 1850s. Not until the decision in Dred Scott did he finally decide to abandon his earlier belief in greater judicial involvement in the interpretive conversation about the meaning of the Constitution.
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