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Does Originalism Have a Natural Law Problem?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2021

John Mikhail
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Abstract

Gienapp's critical move is to shift our attention from semantics to ontology. What is the Constitution? How was it conceived to exist in 1787, and how has that conception changed over time? These questions must be squarely addressed, he insists, before asking what the Constitution means. Does this whole text-focused enterprise rest on a mistake? Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and modern scholarship, Gienapp makes a strong and interesting case that it does. Boiled down, his main argument is that the founders were predominantly natural lawyers, and thus conceived of law quite differently than most originalists typically do.

Type
Forum: Originalism and Legal History: Rethinking the Special Relationship
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 361 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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Footnotes

He wishes to thank Mary Sarah Bilder, Jonathan Gienapp, David Schwartz, and Lawrence Solum for their comments on a previous draft.

References

1. See, for example, Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic (originally published 1969; New York: W.W. Norton, 1972)Google Scholar; Stourzh, Gerald, “Constitution: Changing Meanings of the Term from the Early Seventeenth to the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, ed. Ball, Terence and Pocock, J.G.A. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988)Google Scholar; Bilder, Mary Sarah, “The Emerging Genre of the Constitution: Kent Newmyer and the Heroic Age,” Connecticut Law Review 52 (2021): 1263–1279Google Scholar.

2. See, in this volume, Gienapp, Jonathan, “Written Constitutionalism, Past and Present,” Law and History Review 39 (2021): 321–360Google Scholar.

3. See, for example, Saul Cornell, “What Today's Second Amendment Activists Forget: The Right to Not Bear Arms,” Washington Post, January 18, 2021; Marcia Coyle, “2 Amicus Briefs Played Big Roles in Latest ‘Emoluments’ Ruling Against Trump,” National Law Journal, May 1, 2019; Noah Wilend, “Hundreds of Historians Speak Out on Impeachment,” New York Times, December 16, 2019.

4. See, for example, Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767); Matthew Hale, Preface to Rolle's Abridgment (1668); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40); Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1673); Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785); and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). See generally John Mikhail, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); John Mikhail, “‘Plucking the Mask of Mystery from Its Face’: Jurisprudence and H.L.A. Hart,” Georgetown Law Journal 95 (2007): 733–79.

5. Hall, Kermit L. and Hall, Mark David, eds., Collected Works of James Wilson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007) 1:368Google Scholar.

6. See generally Marcus, Maeva, ed., The Documentary History of the Supreme Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985–2007)Google Scholar (hereafter “DHSC”); see also Casto, William R., The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

7. See, for example, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 502–27 (1965) (Black, J., dissenting).

8. Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government, ed. Macpherson, C.B. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 9Google Scholar.

9. See Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. Prest, Wilfrid (originally 1765; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1:33–47Google Scholar.

10. See Locke, John, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. Von Leyden, W. (originally 1660; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 137–45Google Scholar; Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, Peter H. (originally 1689; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 65–84Google Scholar.

11. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:38.

12. See Cover, Robert, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 25–30Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 27.

14. Gienapp, “Written Constitutionalism,” 343.

15. Virginia Declaration of Rights, Art. 1 (emphasis added). For background on this episode, see John David Mays, Edmund Pendleton 1721–1803: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 2:121–22.

16. See Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913), 2:137; William Pierce to St. George Tucker, September 28, 1787, American Historical Review 3 (1898): 313–317; see also Charles F. Hobson and Robert A. Rutland, eds., The Papers of James Madison (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 12:200, 203–06.

17. The origin and fate of women's suffrage in New Jersey arguably points in a similar direction. See generally Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Campbell Curry-Ledbetter, “Women's Suffrage in New Jersey 1776–1807: A Political Weapon,” Georgetown Journal of Gender & the Law 21(2020): 705–23.

18. Gienapp, “Written Constitutionalism,” 344.

19. Records, note 16, at 2:369, 376, 435–36, 440.

20. See Mikhail, John, “James Wilson, Early American Land Companies, and the Original Meaning of ‘Ex Post Facto Law,’” Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy 17 (2019): 79–146Google Scholar.

21. Gienapp, “Written Constitutionalism,” 332, 345.

22. Vanhorne's Lessee v. Dorrance, 2 Dallas 304, 308 (1795).

23. DHSC, note 6, at 8:162; Collected Works of James Wilson, note 5, at 1:245–46, 737–743; Mikhail, note 20, at 131–39.

24. From Timothy Pickering, March 10, 1828, in Hobson, Charles F., ed., The Papers of John Marshall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 11:72Google Scholar.

25. See U.S. Const. art. I, §8, cl. 18; amend. IX.