Saturday, November 8, 2008 Epps on The Antebellum Political
Background of the 14th Amendment, and more Posted by Mary L.
Dudziak Garrett Epps, University of Baltimore School of Law, has
posted an article, The Antebellum Political Background of the
Fourteenth Amendment. It appeared in Law & Contemporary Problems
(2004) . He has also posted on SSRN a lecture, Second Founding:
The Story of the Fourteenth Amendment, and a speech on The Bill
of Rights. Here's the article abstract: Understanding the
Fourteenth Amendment is the key question of Constitutional law,
both as it pertains to individual rights and, in many areas, as
it relates to questions of Congressional power as opposed to the
reserved powers of the states. The Amendment is often
disaggregated and read clause by clause - but the intellectual
and political background of its framers suggests that the
Amendment in fact forms a coherent whole and that reading it as
a whole might be a fertile source of new meanings. The Amendment
was written by politicians w