In 1799, the Federalist minority of the Virginia House of Delegates produced an extended defense of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This Minority Report responded to Madison's famous Virginia Resolutions and efforts by Virginia Republicans to tar the Adams Administration with having exceeded its powers under the federal Constitution. Originally attributed to John Marshall by biographer Albert Beveridge, recent biographies of Marshall have omitted the episode or rejected Beveridge's claim and the current editors of the Papers of John Marshall omitted the Minority Report from their multi-volume collection of Marshall's work. What was once an assumed (if controversial) episode in Marshall's career has disappeared from otherwise exhaustive accounts of his life and work. As in Philip K. Dick's story, Minority Report, an alternate view of events has been unceremoniously erased from the official record.
the fourteenth amendment and the privileges and immunities of american citizenship This book presents the history behind a revolution in American liberty: the 1868 addition of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This exhaustively researched book follows the evolution in public understanding of "the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" from the early years of the Constitution to the critical national election of 1866. For the first ninety-two years of our nation's history, nothing in the American Constitution prevented states from abridging freedom of speech, prohibiting the free exercise of religion, or denying the right of peaceful assembly. The suppression of freedom in the southern states convinced the Reconstruction Congress and the supporters of the Union to add an amendment forcing the states to respect the rights announced in the first eight amendments. But rather than eradicate state autonomy altogether, the people embraced the Fourteenth Amendment that expanded the protections of the Bill of Rights and preserved the Constitution's original commitment to federalism and the principle of limited national power. Kurt T. Lash holds the Guy Raymond Jones Chair in Law at the University of Illinois College of Law where he directs the Program on Constitutional Theory, History, and Law. A graduate of Yale Law School, Lash has served as the Chair of the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Constitutional Law, and his work has been cited by state and federal courts of all levels, including the United States Supreme Court. He has authored numerous articles and books on constitutional history and law, and his work has been published by the Stanford
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