Until recently, historians of American constitutionalism agreed that, except for the infamous Dred Scott decision, the most unfortunate decisions of the Supreme Court were those that incorporated the notion of laissez-faire into the Constitution in the late nineteenth century. These decisions permitted the Court to frustrate efforts to secure a more just economic order in the United States until the 1930s. The intellectual foundations of laissez-faire constitutionalism have been so alien to most legal scholars since the 1930s (and equally unintelligible to many even earlier) that they have found it difficult to believe these decisions were the result of efforts to enforce ‘neutral’ principles of constitutional law, to utilize the terms of Herbert Wechsler's famous analysis. They could not conceive of the Court's rhetoric about liberty and due process as anything but cant, a subterfuge designed to camouflage other purposes.

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In We The People: Transformations, Bruce Ackerman draws attention 2. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, a few conservatives argued that what became the 13th and 14th Amendments were illegitimate because they did not merely amend the existing constitutional system but fundamentally altered it, thus going beyond the intentions of the Framers.

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