This short review essay on Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell's The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s-1830s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), is part of an April 2024 roundtable in Federal History, and focuses on The Partisan Republic's critical assessment of the rise of “white democracy." The essay raises two concerns: first, regarding Leonard and Cornell's assertion that the founders intended to create a republic, not a democracy, and second, whether the politics that resulted from the Jacksonian movement should truly be considered an advance for democracy. Pointing to original evidence from Virginia during the founding period and early republic, the review argues that at least some thinkers saw "republic" and "democracy" as synonymous, and that judicial review was accepted by an important subset of influential early American political leaders long before it became associated with the Marshall Court.
Over two centuries, UVA Law evolved from a regional, segregated law school into a nationally recognized leader in legal education. As this collection...
Until he joined the U.S. government in 1934, Robert H. Jackson had been a lawyer in private practice in Upstate New York who was admitted to the bar...
Although research suggests that countries' colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial...
Curtis Bradley’s new book on Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs is the definitive account of a mode of constitutional interpretation that has proven...
It is hard to imagine an area of constitutional law that has changed more in Judge Wilkinson's time on the bench than the First Amendment. When Judge...
Before he became editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and before he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States, and before he...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
St. George Tucker is commonly regarded as the most important commentator on American law in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the first...
This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...
This paper describes the response of George Washington's administration to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to...
When Class Competed with Race and Lost: An Origin Story of the Political Marginalization of the Poor
On March 1, 2024, the University of Richmond Law Review hosted a symposium entitled Vestiges of the Confederacy: Reckoning with the Legacy of the...
In DeTreville v. Smalls, an 1879 case from Port Royal, South Carolina, the Supreme Court declared that titles to land that had been sold in...
This short review essay on Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell's The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...
Offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...
The conventional wisdom is that the Commander-in-Chief Clause arms the President with a panoply of martial powers. By some lights, the Clause not only...
Sandy Levinson has always taken secession arguments seriously. This is, in my eyes, one of his great virtues. There are very few scholars who would be...