The Interbellum Constitution

“No scholar is better equipped to challenge our understanding of the history of federalism than Alison LaCroix. In this pioneering study, she recovers the spirited, contingent, decades-long argument that shaped an era that most constitutional historians have dismissed as uneventful. Essential reading.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States“Alison LaCroix’s invaluable book is a fount of information and brilliant insights about a grievously neglected period of American constitutional development. It is often gripping in the stories it relates. This is truly essential reading.”—Sanford Levinson, author of An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century“A brilliant, alternately rollicking and harrowing account of the law in action in the nineteenth-century United States. Prodigiously researched and bristling with startling revisionist arguments, this book is far and away the best account of the roiling world of American federalism in the crucial decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Interbellum Constitution carries urgent lessons for the emerging federal-state battles of our times.”—John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19

Alison L. LaCroix is Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law and Associate Member of the History Department at the University of Chicago. She served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and is the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism.