Most of what lawyers learn about the “Interbellum Constitution”–i.e., constitutional law between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Civil War—comes from the handful of major Supreme Court decisions of that era that law schools still teach as part of the required first-year curriculum. McCulloch v. Maryland for the supremacy of the federal government vis-à-vis the states; Gibbons v. Ogden for Congress’s power over interstate commerce; Dred Scott (and maybe Prigg v. Pennsylvania) for slavery; Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee for the relations between state and federal courts; and maybe, if a professor is ambitious enough, more complicated fare like the Passenger Cases. Through modern eyes, we view the great constitutional debates of the era largely (if not exclusively) as those that played out in the pages of the relevant Supreme Court reports—as compiled by Henry Wheaton (1816–27), Richard Peters (1828–42), or Benjamin Chew Howard (1843–60).
But in her magisterial new history of the constitutional debates of the era, legal historian Alison LaCroix expands her (and our) horizons beyond the modest contributions of the Supreme Court of the era and to the broader debates that played out on the ground—including, critically, in the justices’ rulings and opinions while riding circuit. On everything from the nature of the union to the scope of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause to the status of Native American tribes to the intractable moral, political, and legal debates over slavery, our understanding of the debate over “federalism” during the interbellum period has been unhelpfully binary—pitching everything in stark “federal” vs. “state” terms. LaCroix’s book documents the reality of a “federalism of fractals” that was far more nuanced and jurisdictionally interdependent than the most famous Supreme Court decisions might suggest—where states and the federal government were not the only players and where the contest for power was more complicated than a constant antipodean tug-of-war between state capitals and Washington.
Original source can be found here.