Not your Father’s Federalism: Primus, Enumeration, and State Power in the Modern Era

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Richard Primus, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press, 2025).

Abbe Gluck

Richard Primus’s vision is not, as they say, your father’s federalism. His meticulous historical inquiry into enumeration yields just enough ambiguity to throw into doubt whether the Constitution’s internal limits are what actually safeguard federalism, or whether it’s something else entirely—assuming of course that the concept of state autonomy still has meaning in an era of national power. Primus emphatically thinks it does, just not that the constitutional provisions that courts typically cite in service of it actually do much work.

Constitutional Anti-Enumerationism from William Winslow Crosskey to Richard Primus

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Richard Primus, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press, 2025).

William Baude 

The spirit of William Winslow Crosskey is smiling.

Crosskey was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, a few hours drive from the University of Michigan, who published his magnum opus in 1954. It was a two-volume book called Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States, whose central claim was that the courts and the legal profession had wrongly come to believe that the federal government was one of limited enumerated powers. According to Crosskey “the actual, historic meaning of the document – that is, the truly intended character of the Government of the United States” had become lost. It was “a matter unknown, alike, to our accepted constitutional law, and our conventional American histories.”

Crosskey wrote:

The present misconceptions are products, in the main, of the many attempts that have been made throughout our history to distort the Constitution to serve some political end. When successful, such attempts commonly come, in the course of time, to be thought of as triumphs of orthodoxy; the antecedent, true orthodoxies become discredited; and very often, forgotten. This has happened since the Constitution was drawn, again and again.

The ingredients of the enumerated powers myth, in Crosskey’s telling, were many – linguistic drift from Founding-era word meanings, a loss of Founding-era political conceptions, deceptions perpetrated by James Madison, excessive reliance on The Federalist, Chief Justice Marshall’s inadequately and overly defensive response to the aggression of Jeffersonian ideology, and more.

While Crosskey’s book originally made a big splash, his ultimate legacy has been checkered. Reviewers came to doubt his conclusions, to lambast his historical mistakes, to resist his originalist methodology, and to shrink from his overbearing and overconfident tone. At the time of this post, his life’s work is out of print from the University of Chicago Press.

Richard Primus’s new book, The Oldest Constitutional Question Enumeration and Federal Power, is in some ways the book that Crosskey should have written. Primus’s conclusion – a radical rethinking of our assumptions about the limits on the national government’s powers – is Crosskeyite at its core. But Primus’s methodology is different. It is textually and historically inflected, but it is methodologically pluralist, not dogmatically originalist as Crosskey was.

And equally importantly, Primus’s tone and intellectual style is different. Primus cautiously and modestly proposes his radical rethinking as a possibility thesis – as an attempt to show that our present assumptions that the government is one of enumerated powers is not inevitable or necessarily correct – not as a complete refutation. Crosskey, by contrast, thought that he was speaking the capital-T Truth – “a scientifically tested and proved theory of our constitutional history” – from which all dissent was ultimately malicious or mistaken.

Will Primus’s book succeed where Crosskey’s failed? Here, I am not as certain. For one problem that Crosskey faced, that Primus also faces, is that the enumerated powers thesis is deeply rooted in our official account of constitutional law. Primus raises many good questions about whether this official account has really described our actual practice. But in my view the fact that it is our official account is a very important legal fact.

Additionally, I think the enumerated powers thesis is deeply rooted for very good reasons. The first reason is originalist – it is probably the better reading of the original materials. It may be that the Constitution itself is ambiguous about whether the federal government was supposed to be one of limited, enumerated powers. It may also be that this position was disputed among constitutional interpreters at the Founding. But the enumerated powers thesis seems to me to be the more natural view; the more widespread view; and perhaps even the view that was necessary to ensure the Constitution’s ratification.

In my view, originalism itself is the official story of our law. So we should not disregard an official account of our constitutional law that is also correct on originalist grounds. But Primus, as I mentioned, is not an originalist so he does not rest on a claim that his interpretation is the best originalist interpretation. He thinks it is best on other grounds. But I am not convinced of this either.

Enumerationism has been one of our important strategies for maintaining federalism – a system of divided power between state and national governments. Primus argues that other doctrines (such as the anti-commandeering doctrine and interpretive canons) and political safeguards (outside of judicial doctrine) have done more to protect federalism and would continue to do so. But as I see it these doctrines took hold in part because of the conventional wisdom about Congress’s powers, and even the political safeguards probably rely in part on conventional constitutional assumptions. If we do abandon our official account of a government of limited, enumerated powers, there is little reason to believe these other doctrines and practices will remain stable.

Of course, some may disagree about any of these points. But this is where Primus’s book may ultimately be a victim of its own virtues. Because Primus’s claims are cumulative, careful, and pluralist, they give the reader permission to question the conventional wisdom of our enumerated powers, but they do not require the reader to abandon it. That is why the book’s author is such an excellent and justly respected scholar. But it is also why the book itself is likely to convince only those readers who were already hoping to be convinced. 

William Baude is the Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and can be reached at baude@uchicago.edu.

Does Anybody Else Suffer from Enumerationism?

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Richard Primus, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press, 2025).

William Ewald 

The most striking thing about the bundle of ideas Richard Primus calls “Enumerationism” is how distinctively American it is. (It will be helpful to capitalize the word to distinguish the theory from the simple enumeration of federal powers.) All constitutions apportion governmental powers, but the near-universal American understanding that Article I, §8 is meant to limit Congressional power (and related ideas, like his “internal limits canon,” which says that the enumerated powers must add up to less than the powers of a government of general jurisdiction) is not found in any other constitutional system with which I am familiar; not, at any rate, in the same way. Why is that? What lies behind this American exception? Is Enumerationism the reflection of deep constitutional principle, or is it merely the result of defective constitutional design?

Let’s start with a couple of examples. In the United Kingdom, the fundamental constitutional principle is the sovereignty of Parliament. Parliament legislates; the executive acts; and executive action is subject to “judicial review” (in the British sense) to ensure that it conforms to settled law. But Parliament itself is free of judicial control, legally able to pass whatever laws it wishes.

The principal constraints on its legislative power are customary and political. Numerous constitutional conventions, nowhere codified but well understood, bind the hands of the Government.  The Prime Minister must have the support of the Cabinet and a majority of the Commons; proposed bills must be submitted to the House of Lords for scrutiny and suggested amendment; major legislation must first have been presented to the nation in the manifesto of the victorious party; and so on. In Primus's helpful taxonomy (pp. 37-39), these restraints are procedural. But Parliament itself is legally unbound. Plainly, in such a system, the problem of “Enumerationism” cannot arise, for the simple reason that there exists no enumeration of parliamentary powers.

The Many Meanings of Enumeration

Guest Blogger

There's No I In Law

Gerard N. Magliocca

That's the theme of my new essay in Slate.

Will Richard Primus Get the Readership He Deserves (and the Country Needs)?

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Richard Primus, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press, 2025).

Sandy Levinson 

In February I contributed, under the title Who Is The Audience For This Book?, to a Balkinization symposium on Zack Price’s Constitutional Symmetry: Judging in a Divided Republic. I did not mean to be snarky or to criticize what is in fact an interesting book.  My point was simple, perhaps even simplistic:  The book was in effect a plea to the members of the Supreme Court to mend their ways and to adopt a more self-consciously politically “symmetrical” approach when writing opinions, especially in cases that touched on polarizing issues.  Thus, I argued, it really didn’t matter what the general response might be to Price’s arguments, many of which were certainly compelling, if the justices themselves did not read his book and change their behavior accordingly.  Instead, it might be just another “academic” book, comparable, in its own way, to a missive thrown into the vast ocean with the hope that someone will find it and read it. 

Enumeration and My Discontent

Guest Blogger

Balkinization Symposium on Richard Primus, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power

JB

This week at Balkinization we are hosting a symposium on Richard Primus' new book, The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power (Harvard University Press, 2025).

We have assembled a terrific group of commentators, including Will Baude (Chicago), William Ewald (Penn), Jonathan Gienapp (Stanford), Abbe Gluck (Yale), Sandy Levinson (Texas), John Mikhail (Georgetown), Christina Ponsa-Kraus (Columbia).

At the conclusion, Richard will respond to the commentators.

Balkinization Symposium on Free Speech in Crisis-- Collected Posts

JB

Here are the collected posts for our Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

1. Jack Balkin, Introduction to the Symposium

2. Mary Anne Franks, From Watchdogs to Lapdogs: Selling Out the Fourth Estate for Scraps at Trump’s Table

3. Eugene Volokh, The Crisis of the Media Environment

4. Robert C. Post , Political Polarization, the Internet, and Free Speech

5. Richard H. Pildes, Election as a Distinct Sphere Under the First Amendment

6. Bradley A. Smith, Campaign Finance and Free Speech: The Extreme and the Mainstream

7. Ann Southworth, How Did We Get $peech?

8. Richard L. Hasen, The Ultrarich Have Reshaped Presidential Elections. Here’s Where They’re Looking Next

9. Helen Norton, Threats to Workplace Speech in a Time of Free Speech Crisis

10. Elizabeth Sepper, Speech for the Anti-Woke Workplace

11. Vicki C. Jackson, The Trump Administration’s Attack on Knowledge Institutions

12. Benjamin Sachs, Employer Property, Employer Speech, and Worker Organizing

13. Amanda Shanor, The Rise of Identitarian Legalism and the Workplace as a Site of Resistance to Authoritarianism

14. Genevieve Lakier, The Trump Administration’s War on Free Speech, the McCarthy Analogy, and the Limits of the First Amendment-- Part One

15. Genevieve Lakier, The Trump Administration’s War on Free Speech, the McCarthy Analogy, and the Limits of the First Amendment-- Part Two

The Trump Administration’s War on Free Speech, the McCarthy Analogy, and the Limits of the First Amendment-- Part Two

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Genevieve Lakier

[This is Part Two of a two part essay]

3. The Problematic Immigration Law Precedents, and the Incomplete Project of Anti-McCarthyism

The same, happy story is not true of all aspects of First Amendment law, however.  In other respects, contemporary free speech doctrine does not provide significantly more protection against political repression than would have been true in the 1950s. This is because, despite the Court’s explicit rejection of the kind of ‘ad hoc balancing’ that was a hallmark of the First Amendment jurisprudence of the 1950s, the Court did not in subsequent decades reject all of the doctrinal features of First Amendment law that, during the Second Red Scare, enabled the government to chill the speech of political dissenters without facing significant constitutional constraint.

Most notably, the Court did not reject—and still has not rejected—the McCarthy Era precedents that more or less denied the possibility of First Amendment constraints on the exercise of the deportation power, even when this power was exercised in a viewpoint discriminatory manner. To the contrary: in the decades after the Second Red Scare,  the Court more or less doubled down on immigration law’s First Amendment exceptionalism, notwithstanding plenty of evidence that both during the McCarthy Era and in the decades after, the government frequently used its immigration powers to do what the First Amendment was intended to prevent: namely, inoculate itself from criticism, and discriminate against speakers in public discourse because of their views.

It is worth asking why the Court did not see fit to correct what already by the early 1950s some of the justices clearly recognized as a problematic gap in the skein of free speech protections. One of the reasons surely has to be the Court’s enduring belief that vibrant protection for domestic freedom of speech can coexist with largely unconstrained executive power to deport or deny entrance to foreign speakers. This is a mistaken belief. As we now understand very well, and judges who lived through the Second Red Scare should have understood, policies to deport migrants or exclude them from the United States because of their speech can have profound effects on the domestic speech environment—indeed, are intended to. They do not shore up the United States’ democratic or liberal character, in other words, but instead fatally undermine it.

Whither Conference Committees?

Gerard N. Magliocca

I have a civics question about the budget bill. The House passed a budget. The Senate amended that budget. Then the House was told that they must enact the Senate budget as is or else.

Now there used to be a thing called a "conference committee" that reconciled House and Senate bills. Then each chamber would vote on the reconciled version. Perhaps this was never the practice for the budget reconciliation process (forgive my ignorance if that is so). But my sense is that for high-profile legislation the function of the conference committee is now performed by the majority party's leaders in each chamber. This is not a healthy development, especially for back-benchers. 

The Trump Administration’s War on Free Speech, the McCarthy Analogy, and the Limits of the First Amendment-- Part One

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Genevieve Lakier

[This is Part One of a two part essay.]

The United States is currently facing the most serious attack on freedom of speech that anyone reading this has likely experienced in their lifetime. Over the past hundred or so days, the Trump administration has attempted to undermine the independence of not merely some of the institutions that traditionally fuel and shape the democratic public sphere in the United States, but virtually all of them. The administration has used the levers of federal power to punish, or threaten to punish, members of the news media, universities, law firms, libraries, not to mention many of the federal scientific and data-gathering bureaucracies. Even major public cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian have been targeted as part of this campaign of what can only be described as a project of ideological purification.  

In the face of this concerted attack on the independence of the democratic public sphere and, by proxy, the very foundations of American democracy itself, it is natural to seek analogies from other times and places to help make the scary novelty of this moment somewhat less so. Two sets of comparisons are clearly relevant. The first is to similar campaigns of ideological purification that have occurred recently in other countries—for example, India, or Mexico, or Hungary. The second is to campaigns of political repression that occurred in the United States in previous decades—the most obvious parallel being the campaign of political repression that occurred during the Second Red Scare, or the McCarthy Era.

Both analogies are helpful for understanding what the current wave of repression might be designed to accomplish, as well as what is and is not unique about it. For First Amendment scholars, however, the analogy to the McCarthy Era is particularly revealing. This is because, although the political character of the Trump administration’s speech repression differs in important ways from that which characterized the Second Red Scare—in particular, it is focused far more on political opposition, not just radical groups and speakers, and is therefore less bipartisan and more authoritarian in character (more akin in that respect to the repression in contemporary Hungary than 1950s America)—its methods are remarkably similar to those that government actors employed during the McCarthy Era.

The Rise of Identitarian Legalism and the Workplace as a Site of Resistance to Authoritarianism

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Amanda Shanor

In the early days of the second Trump Administration, attacks on civil rights laws and initiatives with any egalitarian cast reached a fever pitch.  In his second day in office, President Trump signed an executive order condemning the diversity, equity, and inclusion practices of “major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, … and institutions of higher education,” among others.  It canceled a host of prior executive orders aimed at preventing discrimination or advancing inclusion, including in governmental hiring and contracting.  It ordered the Attorney General, with the Director of OMB, to identify “key sectors of concern” and identify, in each sector, “up to nine” publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations,” foundations, bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education for investigation.  In the weeks and months since, the Administration has canceled grants and scrubbed governmental websites and buildings of a range of prohibited concepts and terms—from purging mention of the contribution of Navajo code talkers in WWII to the taking down of “respect” from the lobby wall of an intelligence agency to abandoning medical and scientific research investigating group level concerns to “deleting” entire agencies advancing social goods.

These attacks, if now a flood, have been building for several decades. A coalition of business, libertarian, and religious interests have pursued a litigation agenda aimed at destroying labor and civil rights laws either by rendering them unconstitutional or subjecting them to constitutionally protected opt-out.  At core, these cases comprise the conservative legal movement’s increasingly successful multifront war against progressive power building. Vice President JD Vance captured this idea in a 2021 interview:

We should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need a de-Baathification program, a dewokeification program. Basically my strategy is to deinstitutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right. It’s very hard. It will require men and women of incredible courage. But I don’t see another way out.

Employer Property, Employer Speech, and Worker Organizing

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Benjamin Sachs

The Mystery of Birch Bayh's Amicus Brief in Reed v. Reed

Gerard N. Magliocca

I am in the Birch Bayh Archive at Indiana University mining gold for my next book, which will be on the Senator's Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. And I've come across a puzzle.

Senator Bayh filed an amicus brief in Reed v. Reed on behalf of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs. This is the only time that Bayh filed a Supreme Court brief as a Senator. The brief is very interesting and advocated heightened scrutiny for sex discrimination.

If you look on Westlaw, though, there is no record of this brief. Indeed, a comparison of the Westlaw report of Reed v. Reed and the U.S. Report of the case shows that the Court's reference to Bayh's brief is missing from the Westlaw version. More perplexing is that I see no law review references to Bayh's brief. I only came across the brief because there are allusions to it in the Bayh files.

Here is where you can get the brief if you're interested. My initial impression is that Bayh, who of course authored Title IX and the ERA, should receive even more credit than he does as a constitutional thinker. 

The Trump Administration’s Attack on Knowledge Institutions

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Vicki C. Jackson

[This essay is adapted from a piece originally published March 28, 2025 on Verfassungsblog]

Why knowledge institutions are crucial for constitutional democracies

Knowledge institutions – including universities, the truth-oriented press, government offices with data collection or scientific responsibilities – are crucial for constitutional democracies. They have as a central mission the search for truth or better understandings, through independent application of disciplinary or professional standards of reliability.  Without free discussion based on knowledge, the democratically legitimating role of public participation in elections and policy processes declines. Elections become less meaningful indicators of public views; public checks on poor policy choices, or abusive or corrupt governance, dwindle. A constitutional democracy is committed to the rule of law and the equal protection of rights – to which ends the public must be able to know what the laws are, what their rights are, how to protect those rights, and how well the legal system is functioning. The exercise of rights – whether individually or by organizations – will often depend on a foundation of informed choice.

Institutions provide the home where much knowledge is produced. As explained in prior work (e.g. here, and here), they are critical to sorting through the many claims that bombard us about what is true, and they help protect their working members’ rights in many ways. But knowledge institutions cannot perform their knowledge – creation/verification roles if they are at risk of being punished by the government. They avoid topics or views that may upset the government. As Steven Levitsky says,

“When you see important societal actors – be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism”.

To be the kinds of institutions healthy democracies need, knowledge institutions must honestly and independently apply their own institutional criteria for truth-seeking. Intimidating knowledge institutions not only chills their members’ willingness to be critical, but also the willingness of others in society publicly to question the government. (Attacks on these institutions are often coupled with attacks on unpopular minorities, such as foreign student protesters, and other assaults on constitutional democracy.)

And this is what is happening in the United States today, across many different kinds of knowledge institutions.

Speech for the Anti-Woke Workplace

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Elizabeth Sepper

A new form of employer speech rights is burgeoning in the federal courts. Employers press for an expressive associational right to exclude unwanted workers. Although the Supreme Court has said that “expressive association is not reserved for advocacy groups,” in practice the right has extended to organizations that bring people together to speak—for example, to amplify a message, pursue civic goals, or unite coreligionists. The employment relationship had not qualified. But that is quickly changing.

A number of federal court decisions now hold that expressive association shields employers from antidiscrimination law. These cases—described in brief below—elide important distinctions between work and voluntary membership groups. They highlight broader trends for the future of employer speech. First, discriminatory conduct is becoming speech, and antidiscrimination law unconstitutional regulation of expression. Second, the cloak of religion has enabled courts to push speech doctrines toward deregulatory ends. The presence of a religious party makes these moves more palatable to some cross-section of the judiciary and the public. It suggests that the pro-business tilt of First Amendment doctrine may be overtaken by a pro-religion radicalism even more partial in its application.

Piling Dishonesty on Top of Dishonesty

David Super

     Political differences are normal and healthy.  Sharp divergences in norms and in assessments of the facts will arise in times of great polarization.  Both are consistent with the functioning of a healthy democracy. 

     Rampant lying damages the fabric of democracy.  DOGE leader Elon Musk’s insistence that vast numbers of people were fraudulently receiving Social Security at implausible ages when that age entry was a default for missing data, or HHS Secretary Kennedy’s denials that his department has fired scientists when it has done so in droves, fractures the political community and makes respectful political discourse much more difficult.  President Trump’s and Vice President Vance’s deliberate lies about Haitian immigrants even more directly fracture our political community, persuading their followers that we live in a Hobbesian war of all against all where democracy is impossible. 

     Perhaps by comparison, congressional Republicans’ machinations to pass their catastrophic budget reconciliation bill are tame.  Yet they also demonstrate the complete collapse of serious democratic discourse in the country.  When you openly contradict yourself, making claims that no thoughtful observer of any political stripe could accept, you express the utmost contempt not just for your opponents but for the electorate as a whole.  The message to voters is that either they are members of a minority that may be disregarded because it is powerless or they are so thoroughly enraptured by divisive rhetoric that they will not bother examining the facts.  And, indeed, the message to Republican Members of Congress is that their obedience is so thoroughly taken for granted that leadership sees no need to give them a credible position to defend.

Threats to Workplace Speech in a Time of Free Speech Crisis

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Helen Norton 

Because of work’s centrality to the lives of so many, workplaces operate as sites for individual and collective expression and for democratic engagement. While at work, workers and employers alike engage in, and listen to, speech on matters of both public and private concern. And sometimes the general public is also among the audiences for workplace speech. 

In short, speech at work is often of great First Amendment value. We should thus worry about efforts to restrict the free flow of ideas, information, and opinion in the workplace. Yet governments—and private employers too—frequently silence and distort on-the-job speech in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Here I sketch some contemporary threats to free speech at work.

The Ultrarich Have Reshaped Presidential Elections. Here’s Where They’re Looking Next.

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Richard L. Hasen

[This essay is adapted from one originally published on March 27, 2025 in Slate]

The rise of the nine-figure donor raises two fundamental questions: Why is this happening now? And how will this new spending affect American elections and public policy?

How Did We Get $peech?

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Ann Southworth

The organizers of our conference panel on “Freedom of Speech and the Crisis of the Political Marketplace” posed a difficult question: “How should courts and others conceptualize the relationship between speech and money?” Since I am neither a First Amendment scholar nor an election law expert, I will sidestep that challenging question to address a related one—that is, how lawyers and other actors shaped the treatment of the relationship between speech and money in First Amendment doctrine.

This column briefly sketches the story-line of my recent book on this topic, Big Money Unleashed, about a campaign over decades to deregulate election spending. It draws from interviews with fifty-two lawyers who participated in the major cases, as well as public records and archival materials, to explore the process by which money became speech and most regulation of campaign finance became censorship in First Amendment law.

The Youngstown Concurrence and the Rule of Law

Gerard N. Magliocca

A brief observation that I may develop further in advance of my book. This year the liberal Justices are citing Justice Jackson's Youngstown concurrence as synonymous with the rule of law. In other words, they are not just talking about it in relation to executive power, as Justice Kavanaugh did today in his FCC concurrence. They are instead talking about it something of a touchstone for constitutional law itself. Justice K.B Jackson's dissent in CASA does this, and there are other examples. It's an interesting trend. 

Campaign Finance and Free Speech: The Extreme and the Mainstream

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Bradley A. Smith

It is often suggested that the true test of one’s commitment to free speech and the First Amendment comes when one is faced with “offensive” content or “extreme” views. I am not so sure. 

It seems to me that the ordinary American can be forgiven for not thinking that the future of free speech hinges on the ability to show videos of animals being tortured, to depict simulated child pornography, or to engage in hate-filled protests at the funeral of a deceased serviceman.[1] The traditional argument for policing efforts to ban such speech is not that not that this type of speech has much intrinsic value, but rather that these outer fringes of the free speech must be protected in order to prevent inroads into the core of First Amendment-protected speech. Put another way, we cannot ultimately trust the government to censor such “low-value” speech, over time, without invading the core. The average American, who responds to a pollster’s question or a barstool quip without, perhaps, giving the issue much thought, might, under the circumstances, be forgiven for lapses in First Amendment purity. And in the great scheme of things—at least if by the “great scheme of things” we’re talking democratic self-government—whether or not such speech is limited is probably of little importance, unless and until the government uses such limits as a lever to invade the core. 

If I am correct, then the true test of one’s First Amendment bona fides comes when speech is on the line that is not patently offensive or does not represent the extreme fringes of political discourse. It is when we encounter speech that has greater value, that has the ability to affect public policy, that may in fact shape our great experiment in democracy and self-government, but with which we disagree or firmly wish was not stated, that the First Amendment rubber truly meets the road.

The Indignity of Legislation—And Rethinking Polarization and Fragmentation

Guest Blogger

Election as a Distinct Sphere Under the First Amendment

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Richard H. Pildes

[This is an excerpt that bears on the general themes of this conference from an essay I published in Money, Politics, and the Constitution (2011). I also want to acknowledge the influence of my sorely missed friend, Fred Schauer, including from our co-authored article Electoral Exceptionalism and the First Amendment, 77 Tex. L. Rev. 1803 (1999).]  

… The primary goal of this essay is to explore the possibility of electoral exceptionalism, rather than to evaluate any particular laws or policies that could be applied to elections as a result.

The Ambitions of History and Tradition—In and Beyond the Second Amendment

Guest Blogger

Joseph Blocher & Reva Siegel

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court signaled that it is interested in hearing a challenge to the constitutionality of assault weapons bans “in the next Term or two.” In hearing such a case, the Justices would revisit the history-and-tradition (HAT) mode of review that the Court adopted in Bruen and refined in Rahimi, and has increasingly employed other areas of constitutional law.

The Justices claim that HAT constrains judicial discretion because it ties the Court’s decisions to original meaning and to text, history, and tradition, as means-ends review does not. Our close reading of Second Amendment cases demonstrates otherwise.

Political Polarization, the Internet, and Free Speech

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Robert C. Post 

            Contemporary concepts of free speech first arose with the invention of the printing press, which produced an entirely new form of social organization, the “public sphere.”[1] What we now call the “public”[2] emerged within the public sphere. It was created by “the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity.”[3]

            What we call “public opinion” arises within the public sphere. Public opinion has in turn facilitated new forms of political governance. For the past century it has been common to observe that democracy is best understood as “government by public opinion.”[4] The public, in the words of Michael Schudson, is “the fiction that brings self-government to life.”[5]

“Pocket Rescissions” are a Legal Fantasy

David Super

      Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has drawn a great deal of attention lately by hinting that he might lock in some of the Administration’s unilateral funding cuts with “pocket rescissions”.  This delights conservatives because it tells them what they want to hear; it sounds serious to some who are new to these issues.  In fact, the concept is entirely vacuous, crumbling under even the most superficial scrutiny.  

      In essence, Mr. Vought claims that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 allows the President to rescind appropriated funds without Congress’s approval merely by sending Congress a “special message” within roughly the last 45 days of a fiscal year.  Before delving into the technicalities of Mr. Vought’s theory, we should appreciate the very steep hill any legal argument must climb if it purports to allow unilateral presidential rescissions (which is to say impoundments).

The Crisis of the Media Environment

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Eugene Volokh[1]

The 2024 presidential campaign saw a massive disinformation and misinformation campaign, which likely helped bring the current administration into power. Leading media organizations failed to stop it in time. Indeed, some of them were complicit, through inadequate investigation and perhaps even willful blindness, in the misinformation. We thus face an urgent question, raised by the workshop organizers: “How can and should the media system be reformed?”

I’m speaking, of course, of the campaign to conceal President Biden’s mental decline—a campaign that was only conclusively exposed by the June 27, 2024 debate. At that point, little time was left for deciding whether the President should be persuaded to step aside; for the actual persuasion; for the selection of a replacement; and for the replacement’s attempt to persuade the people to elect her.

Had the Administration leveled with the public earlier, or had the media exposed the concealment earlier, there would likely have been time for a full primary campaign, in which Democratic voters could have made their choice about whom to run against Donald Trump.[2] Perhaps that candidate would have been more effective than Kamala Harris. Or perhaps the candidate would have still been Harris, but a Harris who was seen as having more legitimacy with the public. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Washington Post tells us. It appears that the Democratic Party’s prospects died in this particular darkness.[3]

A Title VI Demand Letter That Still Violates Title VI (and the Constitution)

David Pozen

By Kate Andrias, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Suzanne Goldberg, Jamal Greene, Olatunde Johnson, Jeremy Kessler, Gillian Metzger, and David Pozen

In March, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers sued the Trump administration for terminating $400 million in federal grants and contracts and freezing hundreds of millions in additional funds to Columbia University. According to the complaint, at least some portion of those grants and contracts supported the research of AAUP/AFT members at Columbia. The complaint further alleged that the administration’s campaign of intimidation against universities has chilled the speech of AAUP/AFT members. The plaintiffs argued that the funding withdrawals contravened Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, the First Amendment, the Spending Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the constitutional separation of powers. They sought a preliminary and permanent injunction.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, who was appointed to the bench in 2019 by President Trump, issued an opinion denying the motion for a preliminary injunction and dismissing the case for lack of standing. Judge Vyskocil acknowledged that she could not reach the merits given her standing conclusion. She nonetheless went on to suggest that the funding cutoff did not implicate the First Amendment and was unrelated to Title VI, so that the statute’s elaborate procedural requirements did not apply.

From Watchdogs to Lapdogs: Selling Out the Fourth Estate for Scraps at Trump’s Table

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment.

Mary Anne Franks

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters in red MAGA hats, gas masks, and tactical vests swarmed the Capitol Rotunda. They broke windows, assaulted police officers with American flags, and climbed onto the statues of former presidents in their efforts to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. Donald Trump’s role in encouraging the violence, including his repeated lies about the election being stolen and his expressions of “love” for the insurrectionists, led multiple social media companies to remove or restrict his access to their platforms and services in the days that followed the riot. Meta, then known as Facebook, announced that was suspending Trump’s account indefinitely. Google suspended Trump’s YouTube account. After temporarily locking Trump’s account on the day of the riot, Twitter (now known as X) banned Trump’s personal account on January 8, 2021. Google and Apple removed the conservative social media site Parler from their app stores after reports that insurrectionists used it to plan the attack on the Capitol; Amazon removed the site from its web-hosting services later that same day, citing multiple violations of Amazon’s terms of service. Many mainstream media companies responded to the insurrection with in-depth, sustained coverage of the attack and its devastating aftermath, as well as unsparing analysis of the former President’s personal role in encouraging it. Among the most notable of these efforts was the Washington Post’s comprehensive three-part investigation into the planning, execution, and aftermath of the insurrection, which painstakingly documented how Trump’s construction of the “Big Lie” contributed to the catastrophic event and continued to destabilize the country in the months after. 

Four years later, the billionaire owners of those companies stood dutifully at attention in the very space where a mob came dangerously close to violently overthrowing the government, while the man who incited them – convicted felon, serial sexual predator, and prodigious liar Donald Trump - was inaugurated as the President of the United States for a second time. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, X owner Elon Musk, and Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos were arranged around President Trump in the Capitol Rotunda in a tableau described by former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as “supplicants” making an “official surrender” to Trump, evoking the surrender of Japanese forces to General MacArthur in 1945.

Balkinization Symposium on Free Speech in Crisis

JB

On March 28th-29th, the Yale Information Society Project held a conference on Free Speech in Crisis and the Limits of the First Amendment. The co-organizers were Mikey McGovern, Genevieve Lakier, Robert Post, Keith Whittington, and myself.  

This week at Balkinization we are publishing some of the essays from that conference.  

Participants include Mary Anne Franks (G.W.), Eugene Volokh (Hoover), Robert Post (Yale), Rick Pildes (NYU), Bradley Smith (Capital), Ann Southworth (UC Irvine), Rick Hasen (UCLA), Helen Norton (Colorado), Elizabeth Sepper (Texas), Vicki Jackson (Harvard), Athena Mutua (Buffalo), Ben Sachs (Harvard), Amanda Shanor (Wharton), and Genevieve Lakier (Chicago).

Children will get sick and die because Trump owed RFK Jr. a favor

Andrew Koppelman

Is it a political mistake to kill your voters and their children? That hypothesis will soon be tested.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent mass firing of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is only the latest step in his years-long campaign against vaccination. In the face of a measles outbreak in Texas, he spread misinformation and trumpeted quack remedies. He has canceled vaccine development, cut off research into vaccine hesitancy and joined Elon Musk in massively cutting his agency’s budget and staff.

Kennedy has this power because his support helped elect Trump, and this is his reward.

Democrats ought to hold the Trump administration accountable. Before that can happen, though, the public needs to understand the danger.

I elaborate in a new column at The Hill.

Balkinization Symposium in Honor of Ken Kersch-- Collected Posts

JB

Here are the collected posts from our Balkinization symposium in honor of Ken Kersch.

1. Jack Balkin, Introduction to the Symposium

2. Rogers M. Smith, The Better Angels of Our Nature: An Introduction to the Scholarship of Ken I. Kersch 

3. Mark A. Graber, Confessions of Reviewer #2

4. Sanford Levinson, Ken Kersch and the Possibility of Inclusive and Diverse Conversation

5. George Thomas, Ken Kersch and the Politics of Constitutional Erasure

6. Mary Ziegler, Conservative Christians and the Remaking of the Conservative Legal Movement

7. James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain, Five Lessons from Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution for the Present Moment

8. Carol J. Nackenoff, Remembering My Friend Ken Kersch

9. Logan E. Sawyer III , Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg: The Constitution and Conservative Identity in Changing Times

10. Dennis J. Wieboldt III, Ken Kersch’s Constitutional Imagination: A Student’s View

Ken Kersch’s Constitutional Imagination: A Student’s View

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium in honor of Ken Kersch 

Dennis J. Wieboldt III 

I first met Ken Kersch in the fall of 2019 as an undergraduate student at Boston College. The summer before my matriculation, I came across a university social media post about Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution and thought that it might be a worthwhile read. For one, it seemed prudent to read something by a professor at the institution I would soon call home. And, as an added benefit, reading a book about “conservatives” seemed likely to be personally instructive for my thinking about American law and politics—both because of my quasi-libertarian ideological leanings and the experience of watching my high school peers react with uniform hostility to then-candidate (and later president) Donald Trump. In short, reading a book about “conservatives” and “the Constitution” appeared well-poised to teach me something about myself and those around me.

With the benefit of hindsight, reading Conservatives and the Constitution as a freshly minted high school graduate was equally imprudent and providential. As those familiar with Professor Kersch’s work know well, Conservatives and the Constitution was written for graduate students and experts in the field, not eighteen-year-olds whose only academic engagement with American history was in eleventh- or twelfth-grade A.P. courses. And yet, the copy of Conservatives and the Constitution that I bought six years ago retains evidence of a naive curiosity about the history of American constitutionalism that has yet to abate. In this respect, encountering Professor Kersch’s work as early as I did was providential.

Even as I have eschewed the libertarian leanings of my high-school-aged self, I have repeatedly referred back to Conservatives and the Constitution for the personal and professional reasons that once led me to open the cover of that unmistakably orange paperback. On the one hand, the way that Professor Kersch deftly identified the flaws in conservative constitutionalism, and its contributions to the American political tradition, has helped to shape my personal thinking about American law and politics. Equally importantly, Kersch’s revisionist account of twentieth-century American political and legal history has had a decisive impact on my own research agenda. Indeed, many of the question marks that I once placed in the margins of Conservatives and the Constitution have since become central to my own studies of twentieth-century American constitutionalism.

Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg: The Constitution and Conservative Identity in Changing Times

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium in honor of Ken Kersch 

Logan E. Sawyer III 

In 2020, I wrote a highly complimentary review of Ken’s Conservatives and the Constitution.  The book, I argued, was an insightful and novel explanation of perhaps the key issue in the history of post-war conservatism:  how did a loose and potentially fractious association of different viewpoints and interests become a unified and highly coordinated political movement?  It happened through the use of stories, Ken told us, stories about the Constitution, which were intentionally developed by movement intellectuals in a successful effort to build a conservative political identity.  The book was required reading, I thought, for anyone looking to understand the American Right and its relationship to the law and the constitution.  In retrospect, I was not nearly complimentary enough.  Changes in our politics since I wrote that review have made Conservatives and the Constitution one of the surest guides not just to the creation of the New Right than emerged in the 1970s, but also to the ongoing reconstruction of the conservative movement that is happening today.

Five Lessons from Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution for the Present Moment

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium in honor of Ken Kersch 

James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain 

We had the good fortune and great pleasure to be good friends of and in intellectual conversation with Ken Kersch. We appreciate the opportunity, through this Balkinization symposium on his work, to try to honor his legacy by offering some thoughts on his erudite and sobering work concerning conservative political and constitutional thought in the U.S.

A recent “Best Sellers” list in the New York Times Book Review describes Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny as follows: “Twenty lessons from the 20^th century about the course of tyranny.” Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (2019) provides at least twenty lessons from the second half of the 20^th century about the development of conservative constitutional thought and activism. These lessons are relevant for understanding the present political moment, filled with concerns that the U.S., several months into the second Trump Administration, is lurching toward tyranny, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. Kersch’s book highlights that a recurring refrain by conservative thought-makers and politicians during their “wilderness years,” or “postwar liberalism’s heyday between 1954 and 1980,” was that conservatism’s enemies—including not only “godless communism,” moral relativism, and secularism, but also liberalism and liberal “living” constitutionalism—were leading the U.S. toward totalitarianism and authoritarianism. As his subtitle indicates, conservatives envisioned constitutional restoration (and redemption), to be ushered in when Republicans returned to political power and control of the judiciary. In this post, we sketch five lessons from Kersch’s book.

A Bill Like No Other

David Super

      Over the past few months, the nation’s attention has darted between the chaos and cruelty of Elon Musk’s vandalizing the federal government, the merciless brutality of official assaults on innocent immigrants, the Trump Administration’s wanton disregard of numerous statutes and court orders, its demolition of decades of civil rights progress, its multi-front war on science and higher education, its steady march toward greater authoritarianism, its wildly disruptive on-again-off-again trade wars, its betrayal of and threats against dependable allies, and its humiliation of numerous large law firms – along with a cornucopia of scandals, soap operas, and corruption.  Each is appalling in its own right, and cumulatively they augur badly for the future of this country as we have known it.

     It therefore should not be surprising that President Trump’s transformative reconciliation bill has flown relatively under the radar.  Yet on it marches, with its enactment into law quite possible within the next two to three weeks.  Although it reprises several familiar themes in Republican fiscal legislation, in many important respects this bill nonetheless breaks the mold.

Remembering My Friend Ken Kersch

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium in honor of Ken Kersch 

Carol J. Nackenoff 

Ken Kersch was not only a superb scholar but a good friend.

I knew something about Ken before I met him in 1997.  His father and I were members of the Horatio Alger Society, a small group of book collectors, researchers, and fans of late 19^th and early 20^th century series books for boys and girls. I learned that Ken, a lawyer, had gone back to graduate school to get a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell.  His father wanted to hear what I thought about Ken’s career prospects, and I offered some positive words.

Ken and I met at a Northeastern Political Science Association panel in Philadelphia, when he was working on his dissertation.  As a discussant for a panel on which his paper had been placed, I was struck by how astute, ambitious, careful, mature, and creative Ken’s scholarship was. This was no ordinary graduate student, I said to myself.  He subsequently won the 2000 Edwin S. Corwin Award for best dissertation in public law.

Supreme Court Retirements 2025-Style

Gerard N. Magliocca

No, I don't have any inside information. But I do have an observation. 

In the past, Justices often announced their retirements effective in July. For example, Justice Kennedy's retirement letter announced that he would take senior status on July 31st. Justice Stevens retired "the day after the Court rises for its summer recess," which basically meant July 1.

Those were the days. This year there will be no summer recess of the emergency docket. From now on, Justices are therefore more likely to follow the example of Justice Breyer and retire upon confirmation of their successor. Otherwise, the Court could face several 4-4 deadlocks during the summer on big issues.

Conservative Christians and the Remaking of the Conservative Legal Movement

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium in honor of Ken Kersch

Mary Ziegler 

I discovered Ken Kersch’s work because of his important contributions to our understanding of originalism, but as Ken’s work shows, conservative constitutionalism is and was always richer, broader, and much messier than the interpretive methods that are most prominent now. It is to his work that I turn to understand the rise of the contemporary conservative Christian legal advocacy, led by organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is reshaping not only the law of everything from abortion to transgender rights but also the very identity of the conservative legal movement.

Ken committed to understanding the intellectual underpinnings of these disparate movements. He grasped, perhaps uniquely, how many intellectual traditions shape the contemporary conservative legal movement. Understanding and identifying these different threads allows us to see how mutable the conservative legal movement truly is, and to anticipate critical doctrinal and interpretive innovations before they develop.