The United States is home to the world’s oldest national constitution. What explains the American Constitution’s relative longevity? Presenting his book, Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, Robinson Woodward-Burns argues that ongoing state constitutional revision resolves national constitutional controversies, preempting amendments to the federal Constitution and quieting conflict between the branches of the federal government. He elaborates this claim with original datasets of all 12,000 proposed federal constitutional amendments and all 412 state constitutional revision bodies from 1776-2020, backed by chronological case studies of state constitutional revision. Finally, he argues this frequent, popular revision grants the state constitutions a democratic legitimacy that the national Constitution lacks.
Robinson Woodward-Burns received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary, an M.A. from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University, where he researches and teaches on American constitutionalism, civil rights, federalism, D.C. politics and statehood, and slavery and abolition. His first book, Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, will be published in 2021 by Yale University Press, and his scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Politics, Polity, The Tulsa Law Review, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post
14 фев 2021
