State of State Constitutional Studies: Past Work and New Directions
Panel Discussion
October 24 @ 2:30 PM
The State Constitutions Lab held our first event with a “State of the Field of State Constitutional Studies” conversation about past and current research and new methodological approaches to the field. We were honored to be joined by the Hon. Jeffrey Sutton, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Check out a recording of the conversation below!
Hon. Jeffrey Sutton
Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and author of Who Decides?: States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation (Oxford, 2021) and 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law (Oxford, 2018). The former Solicitor General of Ohio (1995-1998) and Supreme Court clerk to Justices Lewis Powell and Antonin Scalia, Judge Sutton was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2003 and is a prolific lecturer and writer on federalism and state constitutional law.
Prof. Jessica Roney
Associate Professor of History at Temple University and Director of the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Prof. Roney is currently at work on a book project titled The Revolution Out of Bounds, arguing that colonization and struggles over expansion shaped American constitutional development as citizenship, sovereignty, democracy, union, and the meaning of what it meant to be a republic were critically shaped by the American Revolution. She is the author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and most recently of an article in the Journal of American History about the state-formation implications of a 1778 treaty between the U.S. and Lenape/Delaware nation.
Prof. Jane Manners
Assistant Professor at Temple Law School. Prof. Manners is currently working on a project on officer accountability in the 19th century, and has published related articles in the Columbia Law Review, ”The Three Permissions: Presidential Removal and the Statutory Limits of Agency Independence” and the Fordham Law Review, “Executive Power and the Rule of Law in the Marshall Court: A Re-Reading of Little v. Barreme and Murray v. The Charming Betsy.”
Prof. Robinson Woodward-Burns
Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University and author of Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics (Yale, 2021). Using datasets and historical case studies, his book argues that high barriers to national constitutional change have encouraged reformers to instead seek state constitutional revision, addressing national controversies over economic and labor regulations and voting, civil, and gender rights. He is currently writing a second book on state constitutionalism and voting rights.
Prof. Brian Phillips Murphy
Steven M. Polan Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. Prof. Murphy is working on several projects related to state constitutional studies and is a faculty associate of the Center for the Study of State Constitutions at Rutgers University.