Narrative, Interpretation, and the Ratification of the Constitution
Name
Forum Response PM-1.pdf
Size
91.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
053871a6eb086191b8636e28117e320b
Author(s)
Maier, Pauline
Date Issued
April 2012
Journal
William and Mary Quarterly
Publisher
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Citation
“Narrative, Interpretation, and the Ratification of the Constitution.” The William and Mary Quarterly 69.2 (2012): 382-390.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
I am grateful to the participants in this forum for their careful and enthusiastic responses to Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. Some comments usefully extend the discussion beyond what’s in the book . Maeva Marcus pushes the story into the 1790s, when the new Supreme Court took up issues that had played a role in the ratification debates, and demonstrates the continued fluidity of constitutional understandings. For both Marcus and Seth Cornell, the complexity of arguments described in the book weighs powerfully against modern judicial theories of “originalism.” However, as Cornell correctly observes, I deliberately avoided discussing the modern debate over originalism in Ratification, and I intend to do the same thing here. It seems more appropriate to use this opportunity to address the “authorial decisions” that interest Todd Estes and the more general issue of how the book contributes to historical interpretations of ratification, an event that one reviewer described as “one of the greatest political brawls of all time.”i
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.69.2.0382
