Reposted by Maggie Blackhawk
How often do we get to celebrate a MAJOR FREAKING WIN in higher education anymore? Hell yeah to both @jreedmo.bsky.social and @ouhistory.bsky.social.
Maggie Blackhawk
@maggieblackhawk.bsky.social
20K followers 773 following 250 posts
Professor, NYU Law; scholar of Congress, the Constitution, and American colonialism; she/her/kwe.
![June 2026]
The History of the Constitution is Our Future
1115
Recent Supreme Court jurisprudence illustrates the problem. The Court's turn to "history and tradition" to define the scope of constitutional rights rests on the premise that there exists a singular, national constitutional tradition capable of supplying determinate answers—or that it is normatively good to construct such a national tradition as constitutional myth. Constructing that tradition has proven deeply contested. But much of the debate remains rooted in which aspects of the presumed national history are the most relevant, without challenging the presumption of nationalism in the first instance.® In Wol-ford v. Lopez, a recent case to go before the Court on the Second Amendment, members of the Court suggested that the legal and constitutional traditions of Hawai'i—from the Kingdom of Hawai'i's 1838 constitution, through its overthrow and territorial period, and until statehood in 195990—were largely irrelevant because Hawai'i was now "part of the United States."'' By contrast, the colonial laws of New Jersey from 1771, enacted before U.S. independence," were treated as authoritative evidence of the nation's constitutional tradition."3
This asymmetry reveals how methodological nationalism structures constitutional inquiry. Histories that reflect the instability, plurality, and contested sovereignty of expansion are discounted, while colonial-era practices from the eastern seaboard are elevated as national tradition. In this way, the Court reproduces the logic of expansion and forced uniformity, while insulating that logic from interrogation and critique by presenting the centrality of the "nation" as a neutral, even natural, constitutional method.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qcdkgsv4ancml4yt5bde7fwi/bafkreifsyu6t6quaftgfzazxmbemzisortfa4tuzwaev64jgvdwp3npf6a)
