The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms. By Alison L. LaCroix. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024. 576 pp. 24 B/W illustrations. Hardcover, $45.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-22321-7.
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
Winter 2025
ISSN
2044-768X
Publisher
Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration
Language
en-US
Abstract
The Interbellum Constitution is Alison LaCroix’s sprawling account of the development of the constitutional law of American federalism in the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. LaCroix engages what she characterizes as “a strange paradox” that this time “is held to have been bereft of constitutional creativity or intellectual development” even though the Supreme Court through much of the period was presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall and produced enduring landmarks of constitutional law, most notably on matters of federalism (p. 15). She takes direct aim at Yale constitutional historian Bruce Ackerman, who omits the interbellum period from his account of constitutional moments that shaped and reshaped American society. By contrast, LaCroix characterizes the interbellum as an “immensely creative and conflict-filled period” in which “constitutional thought did not reside in constitutional amendments” but rather in “judicial decisions; opinions of attorneys general; lawyers’ arguments in federal, state, county and city courtrooms; the letters of state-crafters; and political speeches and essays” (p. 26). The constitutional developments of this sometimes overlooked period are central to the establishment of the United States as a unified economic force. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) took a broad view of Congress’s power, approving the establishment of the Second Bank of the United States and immunizing it from state taxation, and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) affirmed Congress’s power to regulate interstate navigation to the exclusion of conflicting state law. Through accounts of these decisions and more, LaCroix shows how the early Court mapped out the relationship between federal power to regulate commerce and traditional state power to address health, safety, and welfare, even when those matters touched on subjects affecting interstate commerce. Echoes of these developments reverberate today in continuing struggles between state and federal authorities over economic and social regulation.
Recommended Citation
Jack M. Beermann,
The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms. By Alison L. LaCroix. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024. 576 pp. 24 B/W illustrations. Hardcover, $45.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-22321-7.
,
99
Business History Review
693
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4207
