The first comprehensive study of all 114 state constitutional conventions for which there are records--from Connecticut's in 1818 to New Hampshire's in 1984. By integrating state constitution-makers with the federal constitutional tradition, this path-breaking work yields a superior understanding of how American citizens have chosen to govern themselves.

Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the federal Constitution. Emily Zackin shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. Zackin looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism. Shedding much-needed light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.

The book is a work of non-fiction. The book is a historical analysis of the evolution of a uniquely American constitutionalism that began with the original English royal charters for the exploration and exploitation of North America. When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, the accepted conception of a constitution was that of the British constitution, upon which the colonists had relied in asserting their rights with respect to the imperium, comprised of ancient documents, parliamentary enactments, administrative regulations, judicial pronouncements, and established custom. Of equal significance, the laws comprising the constitution did not differ from other statutes and as a consequence, there was no law endowed with greater sanctity than other legislative enactments. In framing the revolutionary state constitutions following the retreat of the crown governments in the colonies, as well as the later federal Constitution, the Revolutionaries fundamentally reconceived a constitution as being the single authoritative source of fundamental law that was superior to all other statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions, that was ratified by the states and that was subject to revision only through a formal amendment process. This new constitutional conception has been hailed as the great innovation of the revolutionary period, and deservedly so. This American constitutionalism had its origins in the now largely overlooked royal charters for the exploration of North America beginning with the charter granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert by Elizabeth I in 1578. The book follows the development of this constitutional tradition from the early charters of the Virginia Companies and the covenants entered of the New England colonies, through the proprietary charters of the Middle Atlantic colonies. On the basis of those foundational documents, the colonists fashioned governments that came to be comprised not only of an executive, but an elected legislature and a judiciary. In those foundational documents and in the acts of the colonial legislatures, the settlers sought to harmonize their aspirations for just institutions and individual rights with the exigencies and imperatives of an alien and often hostile environment. When the colonies faced the withdrawal of the crown governments in 1775, they drew on their experience, which they formalized in written constitutions. This uniquely American constitutional tradition of the charters, covenants and state constitutions was the foundation of the federal Constitution and of the process by which the Constitution was written and ratified a decade later.

American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War challenges traditional American constitutional history, theory and jurisprudence that sees today's constitutionalism as linked by an unbroken chain to the 1787 Federal constitutional convention. American Sovereigns examines the idea that after the American Revolution, a collectivity - the people - would rule as the sovereign. Heated political controversies within the states and at the national level over what it meant that the people were the sovereign and how that collective sovereign could express its will were not resolved in 1776, in 1787, or prior to the Civil War. The idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Today's constitutionalism is not a natural inheritance, but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about themselves as a collective sovereign.

In Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition, Justin Buckley Dyer provides a succinct account of the development of American antislavery constitutionalism in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the context of recent revisionist scholarship, Dyer argues that the theoretical foundations of American constitutionalism - which he identifies with principles of natural law - were antagonistic to slavery. Still, the continued existence of slavery in the nineteenth century created a tension between practice and principle. In a series of case studies, Dyer reconstructs the constitutional arguments of prominent antislavery thinkers such as John Quincy Adams, John McLean, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who collectively sought to overcome the legacy of slavery by emphasizing the natural law foundations of American constitutionalism. What emerges is a convoluted understanding of American constitutional development that challenges traditional narratives of linear progress while highlighting the centrality of natural law to America's greatest constitutional crisis.

This book examines how the colonial Philippine constitution weakened the safeguards that shielded liberty from power and unleashed a constitutional despotism.

In this, the second edition of State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience, the authors present cases, scholarly writings, and other materials about our ever-evolving, ever-more-relevant state charters of government. The casebook starts by placing state constitutions in context--in the context of a federal system that leaves some powers exclusively with the States, delegates some powers exclusively to the Federal Government, and permits overlapping authority by both sovereigns in many areas. The resulting combination of state and federal charters--what might be called American Constitutional Law--presents fruitful opportunities for give and take, for exporting and importing constitutional tools and insights between and among the different sovereigns. The casebook often addresses the point by explaining how the U.S. Constitution deals with an issue before discussing how the state constitutions handle an identical or similar issue. At other times, the casebook explains and illustrates how the state constitutions contain provisions that have no parallel in the U.S. Constitution. A central theme of the book, explored in the context of a variety of constitutional guarantees, is that state constitutions provide a rich source of rights independent of the federal constitution. Considerable space is devoted to the reasons why a state court might construe the liberty and property rights found in their constitutions, to use two prominent examples, more broadly than comparable rights found in the U.S. Constitution. Among the reasons considered are: differences in the text between the state and federal constitutional provisions, the smaller scope of the state courts'' jurisdiction, state constitutional history, unique state traditions and customs, and disagreement with the U.S. Supreme Court''s interpretation of similar language. State constitutional law, like its federal counterpart, is not confined to individual rights. The casebook also explores the organization and structure of state and local governments, the method of choosing state judges, the many executive-branch powers found in state constitutions but not in their federal counterpart, the ease with which most state constitutions can be amended, and other topics, such as taxation, public finance and school funding. The casebook is not parochial. It looks at these issues through the lens of important state court decisions from nearly every one of our 50 States. In that sense, it is designed for a survey course, one that does not purport to cover any one State''s constitution in detail but that considers the kinds of provisions found in many state charters. Like a traditional contracts, real property or torts textbook, the casebook uses the most interesting state court decisions from around the country to illustrate the astonishing array of state constitutional issues at play in American Constitutional Law. It is difficult to overstate the growing significance of state constitutional law. Many of the ground-breaking constitutional debates of the day are being aired in the state courts under their own constitutions--often as a prelude to debates about whether to nationalize this or that right under the National Constitution. To use the most salient example, it is doubtful that there would have been a national right to marriage equality in 2015, see Obergefell v. Hodges, without the establishment of a Massachusetts right to marry in 2003, see Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. In other areas of constitutional litigation--gun rights, capital punishment, property rights, school funding, free exercise claims, to name but a few--state courts often are the key innovators as well, relying on their own constitutions to address individual rights and structural debates of the twenty-first century. The mission of the casebook is to introduce students to this increasingly significant body of American law and to prepare them to practice effectively in it.