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Hamilton on LaCroix on Ideology & Federalism

By Lawrence Solum

Check out Hiding in Plain Sight: A Review of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism by Alison L. LaCroix on The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog by my University of Illinois colleague, Dan Hamilton. LaCroix's book (Amazon.com link here) has already been featured on the Legal Theory Bookworm. Hamilton's review is elegant and learned.  Here is a taste of the review:

In its treatment of the emerging idea of federalism in the founding era, it is not too much to say that Professor LaCroix's book has done a great deal to change the terms of the debate. We must now take account of the "federal idea" because she has so effectively demonstrated that this idea was at the center of American political and legal thought in a way we have not seen fully before. In this book we encounter the usual suspects, Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall among others, but we have a new frame in place in considering the content of their ideas. It is an exciting discovery, and once we are shown it, we cannot stop seeing it texts we thought had been largely mined to exhaustion, including the Federalist, Jefferson's inaugural address, not to mention the Constitution itself. Just as Bailyn and Wood showed us a republican ideology that explained so much, and ultimately perhaps too much, here Professor LaCroix shows us an idea of federalism central to the framers that we have not considered in full, either because we were not looking for it, or looking at a single point in time, the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, and so missed the progression, and even the content, of this foundational idea.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 19, 2010 (boomark / email).