Making Amends, Part 2 (LAW-CONST1)

The Supreme Court did not strike down a single act of Congress on First Amendment grounds until 1965. Akhil Reed Amar explains what the Bill of Rights was doing for its first 174 years.

This lecture reads the first ten amendments through two themes, localism and populism, and traces them to their source. The Bill of Rights answered Anti-Federalist worries about a distant central government, which is why it opens "Congress shall make no law" and closes with the Tenth Amendment, and why James Madison's proposal to bind the states as well was killed in the Senate. That gap was not filled until the Fourteenth Amendment. Amar shows juries as the connecting thread, appearing in the Fourth through Eighth Amendments as local bodies checking national judges, much as militias check a national army. He explains why Federalists accepted limits on their own creation, as national reconciliation, as a face-saving path for North Carolina and Rhode Island, as a campaign promise Madison had to keep, and as a way to keep control of the amendment agenda. The lecture closes on the Twelfth Amendment, which made party tickets possible while leaving the three-fifths advantage in the Electoral College untouched.