Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued...

As a matter of original public meaning, Article I's Necessary and Proper clause is the starting point for both Congress's power to create offices and the limits

Critics have dismissed originalism as an empty methodology. They claim it is incapable of resolving our most important constitutional disputes, including the debate over the unitary executive. While u...

A detailed and compelling examination of how the legal theory of originalism ignores and distorts the very constitutional history from which it derives inter...

Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School, has posted Hater of Kings: Catharine Macaulay’s Constitutional Regicide and the Declaration of Independence, which is forthcoming in Americans in Revolution, ed. Tom Cutterham and Sara Georgini (University of Virginia Press, 2026): Charles I (LC) The American Revolution was a constitutional regicide. At first glance it does not much resemble a regicide. Charles I had been executed in 1649. George III went on to live nearly half a century beyond 1776. But read the Declaration of Independence carefully and notice how large the king looms. The “present King of Great Britain” aimed to establish “an absolute Tyranny.” The eighteen usurpations each began with He, the king. The king embodied two particular political typologies: Prince and Tyrant. As such, he was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” This constitutional justification for regicide had been developed by British historian Catharine Macaulay in the fourth volume of her History of England. Macaulay’s history from James I to the execution of Charles I provided a historical model, theoretical explanation, and blueprint for would-be patriots. Because of Macaulay, on the far side of the Atlantic, American revolutionaries renounced their allegiance to the king–and to any king–without the complications and consequences of executing one.  --Dan Ernst 

A group blog on constitutional law, theory, and politics

The once-obscure idea of a unitary executive is now central to debates over presidential power.