No concept sparks more controversy in constitutional debate than "original intent." Offering a legal historian's approach to the subject, this book demonstrates that the framers deliberately obscured one of their more important decisions. Joseph M. Lynch argues that the Constitution was a product of political struggles involving regional interests, economic concerns, and ideology. The framers, he maintains, settled on enigmatic wording of the Necessary and Proper Clause and of the General Welfare provision in the Spending Clause as a compromise, leaving the extent of federal power to be determined by the political process. During ratification, however, attempts by dissident framers to undo the compromise were repelled in The Federalist: charges of overly broad congressional powers were met with protestations that in fact these powers were limited. Lynch describes how early lawmakers applied the Constitution to such issues as executive power and privilege, the deportation of aliens, and the prohibition of seditious speech. He follows the disputes over the interpretation of this document--focusing on James Madison's changing views--as the new government took shape and political parties were formed. Lynch points out that the first six Congresses and President George Washington disregarded the framers' intentions when they were deemed impractical to follow. In contrast, he warns that the version of original intent put forth in recent Supreme Court opinions regarding congressional power could hinder Congress in serving the nation.

Grégoire C. N. Webber explores how open-ended constitutional rights leave a constitution open to re-negotiation by the political process.

In 2005, Iraq drafted its first constitution and held the country’s first democratic election in more than fifty years. Even under ideal conditions, drafting a constitution can be a prolonged process marked by contentious debate, and conditions in Iraq are far from ideal: Iraq has long been racked by ethnic and sectarian conflict, which intensified following the American invasion and continues today. This severe division, which often erupted into violence, would not seem to bode well for the fate of democracy. So how is it that Iraq was able to surmount its sectarianism to draft a constitution that speaks to the conflicting and largely incompatible ideological view of the Sunnis, Shi’ah, and Kurds? Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues here that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main sects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.

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Constitution making is a divisive process, and it must be so. In any healthy constitutional negotiation, issues will be brought to the table on which the interests of the negotiating parties diverge. Parties to constitutional negotiations are thus faced with the challenge of developing a final document in which each group within the nation can take pride and ownership, even though with respect to many divisive issues that group will not have obtained what it wanted. There can be no fool-proof algorithms for resolving divisive issues to achieve this end, but there are mechanisms with which every negotiation process should be equipped. This paper addresses mechanisms for resolving divisive issues in constitutional negotiations.

Countries often amend their constitutions or enact new ones following major political events, such as the founding of newly independent states, the fall of an authoritarian regime or the end of violent conflict. Significant constitutional reform at a crucial moment is often a high-stakes process because a constitution regulates access to public power and resources among different groups. While disagreements over divisive topics are likely and even inherent to constitution-making, they may also result in a serious deadlock when stakeholders are unable to reach agreement. A prolonged deadlock can delay or even derail the whole reform process. In this context, it may be advisable to create incentives that can help parties to the negotiations overcome divergence and resolve deadlocks should they occur. This Constitution Brief focuses on strategies and mechanisms for breaking a deadlock in constitutional negotiations conducted in an environment of competitive democratic politics.

The dramatic story of the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, the first new account of this seminal moment in American history in years.

In this groundbreaking analysis of Supreme Court decision-making, Andrew Coan explains how judicial caseload shapes the course of American constitutional law and the role of the Court in American society. Compared with the vast machinery surrounding Congress and the president, the Supreme Court is a tiny institution that can resolve only a small fraction of the constitutional issues that arise in any given year. Rationing the Constitution shows that this simple yet frequently ignored fact is essential to understanding how the Supreme Court makes constitutional law. Due to the structural organization of the judiciary and certain widely shared professional norms, the capacity of the Supreme Court to review lower-court decisions is severely limited. From this fact, Andrew Coan develops a novel and arresting theory of Supreme Court decision-making. In deciding cases, the Court must not invite more litigation than it can handle. On many of the most important constitutional questions—touching on federalism, the separation of powers, and individual rights—this constraint creates a strong pressure to adopt hard-edged categorical rules, or defer to the political process, or both. The implications for U.S. constitutional law are profound. Lawyers, academics, and social activists pursuing social reform through the courts must consider whether their goals can be accomplished within the constraints of judicial capacity. Often the answer will be no. The limits of judicial capacity also substantially constrain the Court’s much touted—and frequently lamented—power to overrule democratic majorities. As Rationing the Constitution demonstrates, the Supreme Court is David, not Goliath.

This essay explores the emerging literature on the negotiation of structural constitutional governance, to which Professor Aziz Huq has made an important contribution in The Negotiated Structural Constitution, 114 Colum. L. Rev. 1595 (2014). In the piece, Professor Huq reviews the negotiation of constitutional entitlements and challenges the conventional wisdom about the limits of political bargaining as a means of allocating authority among the three branches of government. He argues that constitutional ambiguities in the horizontal allocation of power are sometimes best resolved through legislative-executive negotiation, just as uncertain grants of constitutional authority are already negotiated between state and federal actors in the vertical-federalism context. Indeed, at the margins between state and federal authority, executive and legislative authority, and even judicial and political authority -- inevitable zones of overlap and spillover emerge, where interpretive choices must be made. The operative constitutional question then becomes who is best positioned to make these interpretive choices. Huq's analysis of institutional bargaining along the horizontal separation-of-powers dimension adds dimension to an emerging literature on negotiated structural governance more generally. Previously predominated by vertical separation-of-powers analyses in the federalism literature, this new wave of bargaining-literate scholarship emphasizes the usefulness and inevitability of multilateral bargaining as an alternative for allocating constitutional authority in circumstances where unilateral judicial or statutory allocation is suboptimal at best -- and counterproductive at worst. Thematic among these new works is the idea that the Constitution does not resolve every structural question, and that certain unresolved structural dilemmas are most capably resolved by negotiation among legislative and executive actors at the local, state, and national levels. Different authors provide different pieces of the new theoretical justification for judicial deference to politically negotiated governance, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's simultaneous revival of judicially enforceable constraints in many of the same contexts. This essay reviews the unfolding literature on the negotiation of structural governance, analyzing points of conversion and issues of ongoing debate. Overall, scholars of negotiated governance find that bargaining is inevitable because the text of the Constitution cannot account for every possible ambiguity. Moreover, they conclude that political bargaining to resolve ambiguity is valuable when the required decisionmaking does not match the circumscribed skillset of judicial interpreters. Most are skeptical about the value of judicial review as current Supreme Court doctrine prescribes it, but -- and in contrast with previous scholarship emphasizing political safeguards -- many allow for some judicial role to police the most foreseeable harms associated with political bargaining. The essay concludes with thoughts about structural governance issues warranting further scrutiny in the next iteration of the discourse.