The Constitutional Convention of 1787

Date

2007

Citation

A. E. Dick Howard, The Constitutional Convention of 1787, in Historians on America: Decisions That Made a Difference, US Government Printing Office, 9–15 (2007).

UVA Law Faculty Affiliations

A. E. Dick Howard

Center for International & Comparative Law

Constitutional Law and Legal History

More in This Category

Public-Law Litigation at a Crossroads: Article III Standing and 'Tester' Plaintiffs

Rachel Bayefsky

An upcoming Supreme Court case on Article III standing and disability presents critical questions about the future of litigation that promotes...

Can Congress Bar Fully Autonomous Nuclear Command and Control?

Ashley S. Deeks

Matthew Waxman

Congress may want to prevent nuclear command and control from going fully autonomous. Would such a law be constitutional?

Bad Faith Prosecution

Ann Woolhandler

Michael G. Collins

Jonathan Remy Nash

In our increasingly polarized society, claims that prosecutions are politically motivated, racially motivated, or just plain arbitrary are more common...

Separation-of-Powers Avoidance

Payvand Ahdout

When federal judges are called on to adjudicate separation-of-powers disputes, they are not mere arbiters of the separation of powers. By resolving a...

Religion as Disobedience

Xiao Wang

Religion today offers plaintiffs a ready path to disobey laws without consequence. Examples of such disobedience abound. In the past few years alone...

We Have Only Begun to Fight

Kimberly J. Robinson

This story begins with one parent who took his demands for equal educational opportunity for his children all the way to the highest court of our land...

It’s Time to Abandon (or Closely Monitor) Judicial Life Tenure

Life tenure for the federal judiciary doesn’t promote judicial independence or the development of law as the Framers expected, and should be repealed...

Animus and Its Distortion of the Past

Joy Milligan

Do legal concepts alter how we understand the past and present? The jurisprudence of race suggests that they do. For several decades, federal courts...

The Work of the American Law Institute in Historical Context

Kenneth S. Abraham

G. Edward White

This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...

How Federal Judges Made a Political Game Out of Taking Senior Status

A new study shows that lower court judges, and especially conservatives, are using senior status as a loophole to ensure their replacement by a like...

Public Rights and Taxation: A Brief Response to Professor Parrillo

Ann Woolhandler

A division exists between scholars who claim that Congress made only limited delegations to executive officials in the early Republic, and those who...

FOSTA's Mess

Danielle K. Citron

Quinta Jurecic

In 2018, Congress rightly highlighted the problem of sex trafficking, which is a moral abomination and vicious scourge. It condemned sites like...

"Charlottesville" as Legal History

Risa Goluboff

offers a preliminary legal history of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic violence that took place in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on...

The Politics of Judicial Dialogue

David S. Law

Mark Tushnet

The idea of judicial dialogue entered into scholarly discussion in the late twentieth century and is used in connection with different phenomena at...

Why Can’t We Take Secession Seriously?

Cynthia L. Nicoletti

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...

Solidarity Federalism

Erin F. Delaney

Ruth Mason

Studies of federalism, especially in the United States, have mostly centered on state autonomy and the vertical relationship between the states and...

Models of Judicial Review

Mila Versteeg

Tom Ginsberg

Constitutional review is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether law or government action complies with the constitution. Originating...

'Our Experiences Make Us Who We Are': Lessons from Thomas Ruffin and Dirk Hartog

Jessica Lowe

It was 1804, and Thomas Ruffin, future Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, was having doubts about slavery. Ruffin was a young student...