At the Liberty Law blog this morning, I have an essay on historian Charles Laderman’s fine new book, Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order. At the turn of the 20th Century, American officials repeatedly voiced support for an independent Armenian state in Anatolia. The state was meant to compensate Armenians for the effects of genocide and offer them protection from hostile forces that surrounded them. Laderman explores why, notwithstanding the best intentions, the US Government ultimately abandoned Armenians and other persecuted Mideast Christians at the end of World War I. In my review, I explain what this history suggests for Mideast Christians today:
Congressional resolutions are very welcome, but history suggests that these Christians should not expect much more from America. Just as in the last century, despite the best intentions, America’s commitment to Christians in the Middle East today is limited: well wishes, exhortations for equality and tolerance, some humanitarian assistance—though nothing like the massive humanitarian campaign that took place in the last century and saved so many lives. Ultimately, nations act in their political and economic interests, and America does not perceive long-term interests that would justify putting at risk the large number of troops necessary to defend Mideast Christians on an ongoing basis. Many private citizens and charities continue to help Mideast Christians, thank God. But the sad lesson of Laderman’s book is this: if Christians in Syria expect the American government to do more to help them, they will find themselves on their own.
Vitagliano (left) and Nania (right) take a brief break from Center duties to pose for a photo
Marc and I are delighted to announce that our two graduating student fellows, Anthony Nania ’20 and Dan Vitagliano ’20, have earned wonderful judicial clerkships for after graduation. Anthony will clerk for Chief Judge DiFiore of the New York Court of Appeals from 2020-2022 and Dan will clerk for Judge Vyskocil on the Southern District of New York from 2020-2021 and then for Judge Duncan on the Fifth Circuit from 2021-2022. Congrats, guys! Full story here.
Here is a retrospective list of some of our papers and activities in 2019, with links where available. A warm thanks to our readers, and best wishes for the new year!
The book provides detailed empirical support for the proposition that the Supreme Court, far more often than not (at a rate of about 3:1), upholds congressional statutes than it strikes them down. Whittington extends, but also modifies and enriches, the thesis proposed by Robert Dahl, Mark Graber, and Barry Friedman, among others, that the Court is fundamentally a political institution that very often operates in accord with the other political branches. The counter-majoritarian difficulty famously discussed by Alexander Bickel, in Whittington’s hands (and as one of my exceptional students, Joe Brandt, put it in our Constitutional Theory seminar this fall), becomes a majoritarian difficulty.
I’ll have more to say about the book later, but for the moment I want to call a little attention to a small, but interesting, line in the book discussing Reynolds v. United States (1878), where the Supreme Court upheld the federal Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act against a constitutional challenge by the LDS community on the ground that the Act violated its religious freedom. Polygamy was church practice at the time. Whittington counts this as an example right in line with his general thesis, and I think he is right about that.
But he describes the case in these terms:
“As Congress embarked on new social crusades, the Court stood aside. The Republican Party denounced the polygamy practiced by the Mormons in the West as equally barbaric as the slavery practiced by the slavocracy in the South. When the postbellum Congress turned its attention to bringing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to heel, the Court gave it a free hand.” (170)
It may be a small point, but to describe the Congress as “embark[ing] on new social crusades” by enacting this legislation seems to me not quite right. If anyone was embarking on new social crusades, it was the religious organization, not Congress. I mean that entirely descriptively. Laws against bigamy and polygamy were nothing new in the late 19th century. Indeed, I should think that they would have been regarded as perfectly ordinary and unremarkable, and that is exactly how the Supreme Court regarded them in Reynolds: “At common law, the second marriage was always void (2 Kent, Com. 79), and from the earliest history of England, polygamy has been treated as an offence against society.” Enforcing long-standing social understandings by law against novel social arrangements is not social crusading. Quite the opposite.
But perhaps this difference of perspective illustrates a broader point about these sorts of descriptions. What we characterize as “social” or “moral” “crusading” (somehow, crusading has taken on unequivocally negative connotations…tant pis) will depend upon a baseline of what we value in existing social conditions and what we deem ordinary legislation to protect those conditions. “Moral” or “social crusading,” then, doesn’t seem to have much meaning beyond something like, “pursuing moral or social objectives I think illegitimate.” If that’s what it means, maybe we should just argue about those first-order disagreements directly (“which morality is best?”), rather than present those disagreements in second-order dismissals (“stop imposing your morality on me!”).
The King’s College has posted a video of excerpts from my Constitution Day Address last month, on how cultural trends, including the rise of the Nones, will likely affect the legal debate on religious accommodations. Here’s the link:
For readers in the area, tomorrow night I’ll appear in midtown Manhattan on a panel sponsored by the Morningside Institute, “Church-State Relations in a Time of Scandal.” I’ll be discussing recent state attempts to require clergy to report suspected cases of child abuse, including cases clergy learn about through confidential spiritual counseling, and what these attempts suggest about our changing religious landscape. Details at the link. Stop by and say hello!
That’s this new paper, which I’ve just posted, and accompanies this earlier paper discussing the nature of traditionalist interpretation. Here’s the abstract of the newer piece (comments welcome):
“Traditionalist constitutional interpretation takes political and cultural practices of long age and duration as constituting the presumptive meaning of the text. This essay probes traditionalism’s conceptual and normative foundations. It focuses on the Supreme Court’s traditionalist interpretation of the First Amendment to understand the distinctive justifications for traditionalism and the relationship between traditionalism and originalism. The first part of the essay identifies and describes traditionalism in some of the Court’s Speech and Religion Clause jurisprudence, highlighting its salience in the Court’s recent Establishment Clause doctrine.
Part II develops two justifications for traditionalism: “interpretive” and “democratic-populist.” The interpretive justification is that enduring practices presumptively inform the meaning of the words that they instantiate. Generally speaking, we do what we mean, and we mean what we do. The democratic-populist justification is that in a democracy, people who engage in practices consistently and over many years in the belief that those practices are constitutional have endowed them practices with political legitimacy. Courts owe the people’s enduring practices substantial deference as presumptively constitutional. The populist element in this justification is that traditionalism is a defensive interpretive method against what abstract principle in the hands of elite actors has wrought: intolerance, the corrosion of lived experience, and the distortion of text to mirror a particular class of contemporary moral and political views.
In Part III, this essay compares traditionalism with originalism, reaching two conclusions. First, traditionalism’s reliance on practices as presumptively constitutive of constitutional meaning is most distant from originalist theories that rely on abstract principle as constituting the meaning of text and that reject practice-based evidence as the equivalent of irrelevant “expected applications.” It is closest to varieties of originalism that read text concretely. Yet traditionalist judges are not engaged in making guesses about “expected applications,” but in making decisions about retrospective applications—drawing on old and enduring practices either to include within, or exclude from, a tradition the specific practice under review. Second, the essay investigates the connection between so-called “original law” theories of originalism and traditionalism. Original law theorists argue that originalism is “our law” as a sociological and cultural fact. But traditionalism may be more “our law” than originalism in some areas within the First Amendment and outside it. If the positivist defense of originalism truly counts as a justification for any theory of constitutional interpretation (an issue on which this essay takes no position), then it may support traditionalism as much as originalism.”
While Marc went north to Skidmore, I traveled to lower Manhattan today, to deliver the annual Constitution Day Address at The King’s College. Excellent questions from the students. Thanks for having me!
I am up in lovely and bucolic Saratoga Springs at Skidmore College to deliver a lecture on “The Supreme Court’s New Traditionalism.” The talk lays out some general views on constitutional theory and then discusses an approach to constitutional interpretation that I have been developing in this paper and another paper forthcoming in short order.
L-R: Marc DeGirolami, Kyle Duncan, Richard Sullivan, Mark Movsesian
Last week, the Center hosted a conversation on church-and-state issues before the US Supreme Court with federal appeals court judges Kyle Duncan (5th Circuit) and Richard Sullivan (2nd Circuit). The two newly-appointed judges discussed legislative prayer; public religious displays; the conflict between anti-discrimination laws and religious freedom; and state aid to religious schools. Here’s a write-up of the event from the Law School webpage.
