In this article I present an historical/originalist defense of abortion rights under the Florida Constitution’s right of privacy provision, which was adopted in 1980.

The Florida Supreme Court faces a conflict between what are likely its pro-life proclivities and originalism. Through original research into the drafting of the right to privacy provision in the 1970s and a detailed review of press coverage of privacy issues leading up to its adoption in the election of 1980, this article presents an in-depth analysis of whether the original meaning of the privacy provision encompassed abortion rights. It focuses on how the right to abortion was well-known to be a core part of pre-existing legal meaning of the right of privacy as of 1980, and argues that Justice Overton, one of the provision's original drafters, was correct in 1989 when he said the privacy provision codified Roe.

In addition to addressing a current conflict in the Florida courts, this article also suggests possibilities for applying originalism to a modern, state constitutional provision, stakes out arguments for why originalism may be appropriate in that context even if it is not appropriate in the context of older provisions of the U.S. Constitution, and explores the concept of pre-existing legal meaning as applied in a right-expanding context. The article proposes an approach where pre-existing meaning, including expected applications, help form a baseline-plus approach to interpreting rights-protecting provisions. Under this approach, the right of privacy provision protects a baseline of rights, including reproductive rights, determined through traditional historical and originalist methods (including expected applications originalism) even as it may be open to expansion by courts in the future to other, unanticipated, rights claims.

Eric Foner has observed that historians of the Thirteenth Amendment have struggled “to find ways to get the voice of African Americans into discussions of the Amendment’s original meaning, scope, and limitation.” This article is part of a project to answer Professor Foner’s challenge to recover nineteenth-century African American constitutionalism. While there are many sources for accessing the views of African American writers, speakers, and activists, this article focuses on the rich contributions of the Black Convention Movement. Despite its importance in helping to set the terms for Reconstruction, the Black Convention Movement and the Black public sphere more generally have been under-utilized and under-studied as a part of our constitutional history. The documents from the state and national conventions of African Americans that took place from 1831 through the 1860s provide evidence of how African Americans understood constitutional ideals, principles, interpretations, and text in the period of time when significant constitutional change was about to take place. As we will see, the conventions included debates and statements about a range of constitutional ideas, from the meaning of freedom in a society infused with slavery and race prejudice, to complex views about the meaning of national citizenship, to fundamental questions about the validity and morality of the constitution itself.By the 1860s, as the Civil War revealed the possibility of an America freed from slavery, African American Conventions began to present a broad vision of civil society where constitutionally protected freedom and citizenship encompassed everything from suffrage to employment to property to education. This vision, while shared intermittently by some white abolitionist allies, was both more insistent and more encompassing than those ideas of freedom most often articulated in the white public sphere. This vision, I argue, is the lost meaning of African American constitutionalism and is one well worth exploring as we consider how and whether American constitutionalism in the twenty-first century can speak to us

In the 1910s the Supreme Court responsible for Lochner v. United States and Plessy
v. Ferguson supported African American rights in cases such as Bailey v. Alabama and Buchanan v.
Warley. Scholars have struggled to explain how the disparate doctrinal paths of Lochner and Plessy
led to the seemingly equality-friendly cases of the 1910s. Where modern libertarians see liberty of contract countering racism, modern progressives see support for an economic and racial status
quo that did nothing to limit white supremacy on the ground. Stepping away from judicial decisions, this essay looks instead to the writing of Black progressives to understand better the Court’s
context. This essay argues that, unlike the Court and white elites, Thomas Fortune, Ida Wells, and
W.E.B. Du Bois focused on the interdependence of capitalism and racism, stressing the systemic
nature of racial harms across a range of legal and political doctrines. This critique, I argue, helps
us understand better the ways in which the Court’s different doctrines functioned, how they resulted in an anemic response to racist laws, and how we can, today, think more deeply about systemic racism and critiques of current neo-Lochner jurisprudence

This Article proposes a new form of originalism — Counterpublic Originalism — as a method to better incorporate excluded communities into the narratives of constitutional history. Looking at a broad range of originalists, from conservative (McGinnis & Rappaport, Calabresi & Rickerts) to progressive (Amar, Balkin), I find that each wrongly assumes some version of a single “public” at the time of ratification, a “public” comprised of the very elites who were benefiting from the exclusionary practices. Focusing on the Reconstruction period, I argue that there was no definitive “public” but instead a series of partial publics, some (white men) who were legally and socially privileged and dominant, and others (feminists, African-Americans) who operated as dissenting communities that developed their own normative discourse and challenged dominant views and interests. I then argue that these dissenting communities, or counterpublics, provide important sources of public discourse and activity that spoke to precisely the questions and ideas raised in constitutional amendments, and particularly in the Reconstruction Amendments. In the process I also challenge the Supreme Court’s and scholarly treatment of African-American materials on the meaning of the Second Amendment during Reconstruction.

In this essay I review Kurt Lash’s The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship. Lash has written perhaps the most important work to date on the background of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. This essay summarizes the basic insights and arguments of the book and then presents a critique of it on two levels. First, it argues that the background of the Privileges or Immunities Clause is more ambiguous than Lash suggests and that this background does not support Lash’s rejection of natural rights interpretations of the Clause. Second, and more fundamentally, the essay argues that Lash — consistent with some other contemporary originalists — assumes an overly narrow concept of the historical public in his pursuit of the public meaning behind the Clause. Given the formal and informal exclusions of women and minorities from public discourse and decision-making, it is impossible to speak of a unitary “public.” We should consider instead how to identify and incorporate multiple publics and to consider what such a multi-public or counterpublic approach to historical meanings might look like.

This article, which is part of a symposium on the 140th anniversary of the fourteenth amendment, explores the Reconstruction-Era black public sphere as a source for possible meanings for the fourteenth amendment. Similar to some of the work of popular constitutionalism scholars, I propose that an important and overlooked source for meanings of constitutional citizenship lies in the statements and actions of those who attempted to redefine citizenship in a more egalitarian and democratic manner and who established meanings for citizenship on the ground. To do this I borrow theoretical frameworks from political and social theory: civil society and the public sphere. I do so because these concepts capture the structure of nineteenth century social experience while at the same time also connecting this experience to modern notions of politics and society. After explicating some of the main principles of civil society and public sphere theory, I analyze a particular form of civil society and the public sphere that I think reveals important aspects of democratic citizenship - the black convention movement. This movement both enacted citizenship on the ground and engaged in a discourse about citizenship in the public sphere that presented alternative, progressive visions of citizenship, ones that included political rights (suffrage) and social rights (access to the public sphere). The article concludes with thoughts on how the black public sphere reflected different and significant understandings of democratic citizenship, equality, freedom compared to how those concepts were constructed in the dominant public sphere.

This article, published in late-2008, has two goals. First, it seeks to connect doctrinal histories of contract law with the political and social histories of contract ideology. In doing so I hope to show how the tales about the development of contract doctrine can be told more richly by considering the political and ideological developments of the period. Second, and more significantly, this article highlights the ambiguous strands of contract law that were part of the culture of contract surrounding Reconstruction, and shows how contract law was far more contextualized than historians of either free labor ideology or contract doctrine typically acknowledge. This failure to explore the rich context and ambiguity of mid-nineteenth century contract law produces, on the one hand, an inappropriately narrow view of Reconstruction-era conceptions of the potential role of contract, and, on the other hand, a general inattentiveness to the potential uses of contract law and ideas to challenge the otherwise dominant ideologies. The article proceeds through four topics: antebellum equity jurisprudence, antebellum labor law, inn and carrier law, and antebellum feminist uses and critiques of contract. By connecting contract-as-doctrine to contract-as-political-ideology through these four areas, I hope to show that during Reconstruction there was more possibility for both than often seems apparent to those looking back after the Lochner era.