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During the contentious political debate of 1787, Montesquieu enjoyed exceptional prestige in the United States. In their struggle against the Constitution adopted in Philadelphia, Anti-Federalists appealed to The Spirit of the Laws as their leading authority. In response, those defending the proposed Constitution had to go back to Montesquieu's founding theories to counter the arguments of their opponents. Building upon previous scholarship, this article will explore three aspects of The Federalist 's political doctrine where Madison and Hamilton analyzed and subverted Montesquieu's ideas: first, the dogma that republics cannot survive when surrounded by empires if they do not unite their forces in a confederation; second, that in a federative state as in any kind of state, power should limit power; third, that in this constitutional arrangement, an independent judiciary should play a special role. Thus, the core of American federal ideology was borrowed from Montesquieu: that multiple layers of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement is not a defect to be lamented but a virtue to be celebrated if the balance of powers is properly respected. Yet it is only by confronting the Anti-Federalists' intellectual allegiance to axioms of The Spirit of the Laws that Madison and Hamilton were able to provide the first political treatise – however unfinished it might be – on the viability of modern democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the effort by U.S. President James Madison to rationalize emergency powers and reconcile them with the ideological principles of the new Republic. Topics discussed include popular rebellion as a problem of governance, how Madison looked to confederacies to find a way to insert special emergency powers into the federal constitutional blueprint and how constitutional provisions granting emergency powers created the institutional capacity to assert this new authority.

An essay is presented which depicts the views of Founding Father and former U.S. President James Madison about religious liberty. The earliest involvement of Madison in politics and his political reputation centered on the defense of religious liberties and not on building a new nation. Madison was defending Baptist preachers who were imprisoned by the colonial authorities of Virginia acting in concert with established Anglican Church by the age of 22.

The article discusses the perceived inconsistencies of former U.S. president and member of the U.S. Congress James Madison concerning the U.S. Constitution and the powers of the U.S. federal government, identified by the author as the Madison problem. It examines Madison's views on states' rights, his commitment to civil liberties and individual rights, and the legitimacy of the U.S. government. It discusses Madison's role at the U.S. Constitutional Convention, his contributions to the series of essays known as the Federalist papers, and his view of the Bill of Rights.

The article discusses the author's claims regarding a liberal movement aimed at undermining free speech in America as of 2015, and it mentions the U.S. Alien and Sedition Acts, the views of former American Presidents such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and the promotion of liberal ideology at U.S. colleges and universities. Intolerance and arrogance are examined, along with ignorance and the efforts to stifle conservative viewpoints. Several U.S. constitutional law cases are assessed.

The article discusses the lessons that can be learned by examining the positions taken by the U.S. Anti-Federalist Party prior to the creation and ratification of the U.S. Constitution in the eighteenth century. The opinions of members of the U.S. Federalist Party such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison are mentioned, along with arguments espoused by Anti-Federalists regarding governance and the development of a national Constitution. Political philosophies and national power are examined.

One of the most intense debates in contemporary America involves conflicts between religious liberty and other key values like civil rights. To shed light on such problems, courts and scholars often look to the historical background of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. But that inquiry turns out to be no less controversial. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have challenged the traditional account that focuses on the roles of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the movement to protect religious liberty in late eighteenth-century America. These scholars emphasize that most of the political energy behind the movement came from Evangelical Christians. On this revisionist account, we should not understand the Free Exercise Clause and corresponding state provisions in terms of the Enlightenment views of Jefferson and Madison, which these scholars characterize as secular, rationalist, and skeptical--if not hostile--toward religion. Instead, those protections were adopted for essentially religious reasons: to protect the liberty of individuals to respond to God's will and to allow the church to carry out its mission to spread the Gospel. This Article offers a different understanding of the intellectual foundations of the Free Exercise Clause. The most basic view that supported religious liberty was neither secular rationalism nor Christian Evangelicalism but what contemporaries called natural religion. This view held that human beings were capable of using reason to discern the basic principles of religion, including the duties they owed to God and one another. Because religion was founded on reason, individuals had an inalienable natural right to develop their own beliefs and to worship in accord with them. At the same time, that right was limited by the law of nature and reason, which required people to respect the rights of others. In this way, the concept of natural religion established both the foundations and the limits of religious liberty. This view enabled people with different religious and philosophical perspectives to find common ground. It provided the basis for a political coalition between Evangelicals, rationalist Christians, and Enlightenment liberals that secured the adoption of state and federal constitutional guarantees for religious freedom. The Article begins by demonstrating that natural religion and its associated ideas of natural law and natural rights were central to the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Americans. Those ideas played a vital part in many areas of thought, including political and moral philosophy, natural jurisprudence, English law, Christian and Deist theology, and even Newtonian natural science--intellectual strands that came together in the Radical Whig ideology that animated the American Revolution. Next, I explain how those ideas can enhance our understanding of the religious-liberty provisions of the first state declarations of rights; the political controversy that culminated in the passage of Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia; and the debates surrounding the adoption of the Federal Constitution and the Free Exercise Clause itself. Finally, I explore the founders' views on the problem of religious exemptions from civil laws, and discuss the implications of this history for our current debates over civil rights and religious liberty--a subject that the Supreme Court recently grappled with in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and that is before the Court again this Term in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Madison (1751–1836), so-called "Father of the Constitution," held consistently throughout his long public career to a version of textualism regarding constitutional interpretation. It is surprising that for the author of the authoritative notes of the Federal Convention, Madison downplayed altogether the original intent of the constitutional Framers. From 1796 until his death Madison insisted that if constitutional meaning was to be searched for outside the text, the relevant sources to consult were ratifying conventions of the states, and "other public indications" at the time of ratification. In today's parlance Madison adopted a "fair-meaning textualism" method of constitutional interpretation and rejected the "original intent" jurisprudence favored by some modern-day commentators. This textualism appears to have been the method followed by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Madison also believed in a living Constitution–one that had life and validity breathed into it by the ratifiers, and hence the people, not by its Framers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's views about the creation of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment and the impact of the amendment on the founding principles of constitutional federalism in the country. The 39th U.S. Congress in 1865 is addressed, along with the post-American Civil War era, former slaves in the nation, and the views of the late U.S. President James Madison. The attitudes of Radical Republicans and Democrats are assessed.

In Federalist 47 and 51, James Madison contended that the accumulation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the hands of one body or person would produce tyranny. He explained that one defense against such tyranny was to make "ambition … counteract ambition" by giving each of the three constitutional branches of the federal government the "means," "motives," and wherewithal to "resist encroachments" on their powers by another. However, after the development of the contemporary administrative state in the 1930s, rather than serving as a check against encroachments alone, the process of ambition counteracting ambition prompts each branch to develop its own set of controls over federal agencies without necessarily trenching on the powers of the other branches. "Madison's Ratchet" is the tendency for these controls overwhelmingly to aggregate and thereby vastly complicate federal administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectuals as presidents are few-seven in all-and mostly far between: the two Adamses, Jefferson, and Madison early on; the first Roosevelt and Wilson early in the last century; and Obama most recently. The early cluster springs in part from social recruitment and education then prevailing. The later pair also came at a time of elevated public discourse. The latest seems to be a product of sheer chance. The intellectualism of the latter three was self-conscious and mostly constructive to their presidencies. The prospects for future intellectuals as presidents are not bright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the war powers under the administrations of former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Topics discussed include the views of former U.S. statesmen Alexander Hamilton and James Madison on the Presidential Power, the opinion of several political scientists to have more legislative power than the President, and the use of the Presidential Power by both Obama and Clinton. Also mentioned are the Office of Legal Counsel under Clinton, and the U.S. policy for Libya under Obama.

The article discusses the prohibition against bills of attainder in the U.S. Constitution despite the widespread use of bills of attainder to punish loyalists to the British Empire during the American Revolution. According to the article, the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, passed the ban on bills of attainder with little debate or dissent. According to the article, the framers of the U.S. Constitution, particularly Virginian James Madison, were concerned about the security of private property from government intervention.

The article discusses a debate within the first U.S. Congress concerning the constitutional power of the U.S. president to remove officers of the executive branch and whether the power of impeachment was the only option for removal. According to the article, the debate was sparked by a proposal by U.S. representative James Madison and Congress eventually granted the president the power to remove executive officers. The article discusses the significance to which members of Congress attached the question, particularly concerning the concept of the essentialism of the U.S. Constitution.

This Article is the first interdisciplinary work exploring architectural and constitutional theories of interpretation. This "conarchitectual" perspective is used to explore the concepts of form and function in both disciplines to better understand the meaning of structure. While form and function are often referenced in legal analysis, there is little work on the inherent meaning of structure. Constitutional structure is often treated as an instrumental rather than a normative element in modern conflicts. This Article challenges that view and suggests that the Madisonian system is a case of "form following function" in core elements like the separation of powers and federalism. This Article explores the influence of scientific and philosophical theories on the structure of government for Madison. These "Madisonian tectonics" give constitutional structure a normative or deontological value that should frame interpretive analysis. Indeed, the Article explores the role of constitutional structure as a type of "choice architecture" in shaping choices and directing actions within the system. In a conarchitectural approach, an understanding of form and function can lead to a fading of those distinctions--as it did for modernist architect Mies van der Rohe. What emerges is a more consistent and coherent approach to constitutional interpretation that is based on structuring truth behind a design. This Article traces the influences of structure from Madison to Mies to better understand the truth in the meaning of architectural and constitutional structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work measuring the voting patterns of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention largely focused on either individual delegate positions for a handful of key votes or on state delegation positions for a far broader set of votes. We remedy this limitation by modeling the key first two months of the Convention including both some individual-level and all delegation-level voting, while simultaneously estimating the effect of various economic interests on that voting, controlling for various cultural and ideological factors. The findings suggest that economic factors mattered a great deal at the Convention. The effect of such interests vary however by the dimension of debate—representation, national institutional design, or federalism. We conclude that economic interests exerted a powerful influence on the deep structure of voting at Convention, though not consistently by issue or dimension. Specific interests only mattered on specific dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the association between ethnic identity and political factionalism in the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), the American theologian, ethical philosopher, public commentator, and former professor at Union Theological Seminary. It is the first study to offer an extended assessment of his interest in the political theory of James Madison, the chief architect of the US Constitution. In doing so it sheds new light on the interaction -- but also the dissonance - between Niebuhr's ideas on racial factionalism and the ideology of 'colour-blind conservatism' that developed in the decades after his death. Niebuhr queried those who believed that federal institutions could accomplish racial equality merely through top-down acts of legislation. However benevolent governments seemed, he asserted, they were likely comprised of fallible individuals whose support for racial equality masked more selfish interests. From the 1970s to the present day, some conservative policy commentators have tried to use Niebuhr's ideas in opposition to affirmative action and other large-scale government initiatives, many of which are intended to impact positively against the continuing disadvantages of African-American communities. Alongside their reading of Niebuhr, they have tended to stress the necessary neutrality of government interventionism, as supposedly promoted by America's constitutional architects during the late-eighteenth century. A desire for neutrality, they suggest, provides a framework to oppose any further state and federal initiatives in racial matters following the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet in contrast to their ideology of colour-blind conservatism, Niebuhr's diagnosis of intractable race-pride did not require citizens to eschew the importance of state and federal institutions in diminishing racial inequality. Partially influenced by his reading of Madison on faction, Niebuhr suggested that the intractability of racial distinctions required continued federal activity even after the legal dismantling of segregation; so as to channel ethnic tensions through representative mechanisms, rather than simply wishing them away. During the last three decades, color-blind conservatism has tended to eschew the radical implications in Niebuhr's discussion of the relationship between American government and ethnic factionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political thought that informed the design of the United States Constitution largely neglected the danger posed by socioeconomic elites. The writings of John Adams, I contend, are exceptional in this regard. Using Adams's writings as a vantage point, this article exposes two important blind spots in mainstream Founding-era thought and the Constitution it informed. Whereas the likes of Hamilton and Madison insisted that majorities held the clear preponderance of power in republican America, Adams maintained that an elite of wealth, birth, and beauty retained overwhelming power even after the abolition of formal distinctions. And whereas Federalists sought security against the threat of majority tyranny, Adams's principal fear was of aristocratic tyranny-specifically, the tendency of the elite few to undermine both popular representation and effective government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should the federal government be organized--and who (i.e., which departments, agencies, bureaus, and commissions) should do what? The issue is not new: President James Madison addressed governmental organization in his 1812 State of the Union Address, and, in the last century, it is the rare President that does not propose to reorganize some part of the federal government. On many occasions during the past century, nearly every part of the federal government has been repeatedly reorganized and reconfigured. In previous work, we have examined the dynamics that influence the assignment of regulatory duties to an agency, how those dynamics (and the allocation of responsibilities) can change over time, and how the specific combination of regulatory functions and purposes affects agency decisionmaking. We apply the framework developed in previous work to examine the costs and benefits of the design choices made by the architects of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and make some (appropriately hedged) predictions about the future prospects of this recent addition to the federal bureaucracy. We also briefly consider the implications of our analysis for the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the historiographic influences of American legal historian William E. Nelson's work on judicial review. Topics discussed include the decision of the U.S Supreme Court in case Marbury v. Madison, Supreme Court's issuance of a writ of mandamus to Secretary of State James Madison, and deployment of the Court's power of judicial review. It also discusses the legal history of Supreme Court case Cooper v. Aaron.

Presidential power to recognize foreign nations and governments, exercised since the dawn of the republic, has never been viewed as exclusive. Indeed, Congress has enacted legislation that conferred recognition upon foreign countries. Recently, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in Zivotofsky v. Secretary of State, asserted for the first time in American history an exclusive presidential power of recognition. This conclusion, built on a flawed historical record and faulty judicial premises stemming from United States v. Curtiss- Wright Export Corp., exaggerates executive authority and ignores the largely ministerial role assigned to the president in receiving ambassadors and foreign ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]