The Neglected Politics of the American Founding

Two recent books reveal the hidden richness and complexity of America’s constitutional history: Marc Kruman’s Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America and William Novak’s The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Explicitly revisionist, they show how state constitutions were shaped both by their framers’ guiding principles and by the realities of day-to-day politics.