On first blush the Jim Crow Era may seem an odd place to locate anything meaningful about democratic, equal citizenship and the promise of the fourteenth amendment. This article argues to the contrary. The period of Jim Crow, in its negation of democratic citizenship, in fact reveals import aspects about the nature of democratic citizenship. This occurred in two ways. First, whites who implemented white supremacy implicitly understood that freedom and citizenship manifest themselves in a multiplicity of spheres, which is why white supremacists sought to subordinate blacks not just politically but across all social spheres. Second, the resistance to comprehensive subordination revealed the multiplicity of the spirit of freedom and equality in actions and arguments African Americans. African Americans created spaces of democratic citizenship within the dominant culture of subordination. This article suggests that, in studying both the implementation of white supremacy and the resistance to it, we can learn more about how equal and democratic citizenship can be affirmed and implemented rather than negated, and also about the role of law as a tool for both subordination and resistance.

This article, published in 2005 as part of a symposium on Brown v. Board of Education, addresses the contradiction between long-professed and deeply-held equality and liberty principles and a devastating history of racism manifest itself in the Supreme Court’s doctrinal support for Jim Crow segregation. I argue that the Supreme Court managed this dissonance between the legal ideal of equality and the actual practice of racial subordination through the implementation of doctrinal myths, myths which enabled white legal actors and society to retain a formal belief in equality. Through the doctrinal myths of state action, federalism, separate-but-equal, and reasonable segregation, the Court was able to facilitate the white South’s re-establishment of legalized white supremacy, which contravened the basic principles of Reconstruction and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, and yet at the same time argue that it was all along implementing and preserving the equality ideals of those very Amendments. I also consider how, by studying this period of doctrinal myth-creation, we can perhaps more fully analyze current doctrines affecting racial and legal equality, and, in particular, how appeals to the doctrinal rhetoric of equal citizenship may or may not result in actual movement towards that principle even in the face of societal racial subordination.

This article, which is part of a symposium volume entitled "Vision and Revision: The Fourteenth Amendment", considers the implementation of the Fourteenth Amendment during Reconstruction through the lens of democratic citizenship. I argue that Reconstruction can profitably be seen as an exploration of the possible meanings of democratic citizenship, conducted at a time when emancipation forced upon politicians and political thinkers questions about the real-world meaning of citizenship. Congress confronted the necessity of implementing actual privileges, rather than merely proclaiming vague ideals, and did so by enacting a spate of federal legislation throughout Reconstruction designed to implement citizenship and its privileges. I argue that these enactments, when considered in conjunction with the activities of the Freedmen's Bureau and with the arguments and actions of African-American leaders and political actors such as John Mercer Langston, demonstrate a nascent concept of democratic citizenship encompassing a range of activities in civil society - including family, religion, politics, commerce, and education - which were seen as essential to the implementation of full citizenship. Along the way I also challenge the standard historical interpretation that the Reconstruction Era legal and political actors assumed a rather clear division of rights into the three tiers of civil, political, and social, and the even more disputable idea that they "meant" to exclude social rights from national citizenship protection. The Article concludes with some thoughts on the possible meanings of a democratic citizenship vision of the Fourteenth Amendment for modern interpreters.

In this article I engage Relational Contract Theory ("RCT"), with a focus on the theory of Ian Macneil. I argue that while RCT is a valuable approach to contract and contract law, it has an impoverished approach to the role of the democratic state in contract law. I then contend that by mining some political theories which parallel RCT, particularly the work of Michael Walzer and David Miller, we can construct a relational approach to contract law that credits the democratic state with a significant role in contract law. Such an approach, I argue, provides a more compelling theoretical justification for integrating democratic and dignity-based rights and protections, such as protections against gender and racial discrimination, into contract law. Moreover, a Walzerian approach allows us to view contract law and contract generally as one aspect, or "sphere", of an integrated democratic pluralism and so enables challenges to the colonization of all activities by contract and contract ideology. Ultimately it is the hope of this article to reinvigorate discussions of the role of contract and contract law in democratic society. Along the way I also explore, among other things, the strong links between contract and democracy during the American Reconstruction period, modern issues such as consumer form contracting and unconscionability, and the problem of anormativity in relational contract and other "norms"-oriented theories.

This Article wears two hats: on the one hand it responds to recent revisionist re-readings of Justice Miller's opinion in the Slaughter-House Cases, and on the other hand it seeks a historical connection between two areas of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence invigorated by recent Supreme Court decisions. On the latter point I argue that the historical background of the framing and early application of the Fourteenth Amendment reveals an intimate and essential connection between the proper interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (an issue hinted at by the Court in Saenz v. Roe) and congressional enforcement powers under Section Five (an issue actively addressed by the Court in City of Boerne and its progeny).

The Article's architecture is as follows: Part One critiques the Slaughter-House revisionists, arguing that they provide an overly charitable reading of Justice Miller's opinion on the question of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Part Two explores the historical evidence from congressional debates about the Amendment and simultaneous congressional legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedman's Bureau Act and then critiques the revisionists' implicit adoption of Miller's anti-natural rights interpretation of federal citizenship privileges. Part Three develops the idea of the congressional power of interpretive enforcement of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, primarily through a close reading of some of the congressional actions throughout Reconstruction, including the Anti-Peonage Act, the Enforcement (Anti-Klan) Act of 1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This Part argues that Congress took a fairly broad view of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and its own powers prior to the Supreme Court's decision in Slaughter-House, and that Slaughter-House re-directed congressional discourse away from a more expansive, fundamental rights interpretation of the Clause and toward a more constrained equality-of-rights interpretation. Finally, Part Four discusses the final blow to congressional development of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the Civil Rights Cases.

This Article suggests that if it is true that Congress should play an important role in developing the contours of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, then actions by Congress which are based on its understanding of the Clause should be accorded more deference than currently granted by Court. By re-uniting the historical understandings of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Enforcement Clause modern interpreters might find a plausible but overlooked constitutional basis for congressional actions to protect the rights of groups such as women, the disabled, and religious minorities.