Federal Enforcement of Civil Rights During the First Reconstruction

This essay recounts the heroic efforts of federal legal officers and judges to enforce citizens\u27 rights during the 1870s. Part I sets forth the historical events giving rise to the enforcement effort of the Grant Administration. Part II details the problems which the federal executive branch faced when it aggressively prosecuted civil rights violations. Part III details the problems which the federal judiciary faced in administering the civil rights prosecutions brought by the executive branch. Part IV details the national political problems that eventually ended effective enforcement of federal civil rights laws. This Essay concludes that, notwithstanding the problems faced by the federal executive and judicial branches which hindered effective enforcement of civil rights, federal legal officers succeeded in destroying the Ku Klux Klan. Nonetheless, national political developments finally ended any hope of vindicating the civil rights of blacks until the twentieth century

Congress\u27s Power to Enforce Fourteenth Amendment Rights: Lessons from Federal Remedies the Framers Enacted

Professor Robert Kaczorowski argues for an expansive originalist interpretation of Congressional power under the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the Civil War Congress actually exercised, and the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld plenary Congressional power to enforce the constitutional rights of slaveholders. After the Civil War, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment copied the antebellum statutes and exercised plenary power to enforce the constitutional rights of all American citizens when they enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then incorporated the Act into the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby exercised the plenary power the Rehnquist Court claims the framers intended to exclude from Congress. The framers also adopted the remedies to redress violations of substantive constitutional rights the Court says the framers intended to reserve exclusively to the states. The Rehnquist Court\u27s Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, contradicted by this history, is thus ripe for reevaluation

Tragic Irony of American Federalism: National Sovereignty versus State Sovereignty in Slavery and in Freedom, The Federalism in the 21st Century: Historical Perspectives

A plurality on the Supreme Court seeks to establish a state-sovereignty based theory of federalism that imposes sharp limitations on Congress\u27s legislative powers. Using history as authority, they admonish a return to the constitutional first principles of the Founders. These first principles, in their view, attribute all governmental authority to the consent of the people of each individual state, not the consent of the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole. Because the people of each state are the source of all governmental power, they maintain, where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power-that is, where the Constitution does not speak either expressly or by necessary implication-the Federal Government lacks that power and the states enjoy it. Consequently, the States can exercise all powers that the Constitution does not withhold from them. \u27 These first principles define the national government, on the other hand, as \u27entirely a creature of the Constitution.” Its authority is therefore limited to those \u27few and defined \u27 powers the Constitution delegates to it. Moreover, even expressly delegated powers, such as the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, must be cabined. These essential first principles require the courts to limit even further Congress\u27s expressly delegated powers by interpreting them as having judicially enforceable outer limits. Constitutional federalism thus imposes on the Court the-duty of preserving entire areas of traditional state concern from national usurpation. This first principle of judicial review attributes to the courts the role of active overseer of legislative policy. According to this view, the Founders mandated this state sovereignty theory of federalism \u27to ensure protection of our fundamental liberties. Recent scholarship presents a much more complicated picture of the Founders\u27 first principles, as my colleague Martin Flaherty argues. Jack Rakove has shown that the essence of revolutionary constitutionalism was avowedly experimental in nature. He persuasively argues that the Founders did not [lock] into the Constitution at the moment of its adoption ... a set of definitive meanings.” It also appears that the Founders did not expect their opinions about the Constitution to control later interpretations. Larry Kramer shares this view of the Founders\u27 understanding of the Constitution and argues that the real founding occurred when the Founders put the ratified Constitution into practice. David Currie similarly maintains that [t]he First Congress was practically a second constitutional convention. He argues, moreover, that Congress and executive officials, no less than judges, interpreted the Constitution and participated in giving the Constitution meaning and definition in the decades following ratification. Unquestionably, the Constitution created a national government of limited powers. However, the Founders\u27 understanding of the scope of its powers was far less limited than the few and defined powers the current Court\u27s state sovereignty plurality asserts

Searching for the Intent of the Framers of Fourteenth Amendment

IN 1946 JUSTICE HUGO BLACK DECLARED that one of the objects of the fourteenth amendment was to apply the Bill of Rights to the States. He was confident that an analysis of the intent of the framers of the amendment would support his assertion. A few years later the Supreme Court requested such an investigation, but when the analysis was made and the results presented to it, the Supreme Court concluded that the framers\u27 intent could not be determined. The uncertainty surrounding the intent of the framers of the fourteenth amendment has had profound implications on the application of that amendment to civil rights issues. It has probably led the Supreme Court to take a moderate position on the authority over civil rights which the amendment confers upon the national government, thereby largely limiting the application of the amendment to state action. Even that authority has been usually limited to positive forms of state action, such as unequal laws and discriminatory policies of public officials; it has not been extended to negative forms of state inaction such as the failure of public agencies and officials to protect civil rights from violations by private sources. Consequently, infringements of civil rights by private parties have not been proscribed by the fourteenth amendment. The absence of a conclusive and persuasive assessment of the intent of the framers of the fourteenth amendment has thus had a profound impact upon the law and civil rights. This study will show that the uncertainty surrounding the intent of the framers of the fourteenth amendment is due less to any special difficulties inherent in the amendment and the circumstances surrounding its adoption, than to the inadequacies and errors of the studies that have been made on the subject. Hopefully, this study will also demonstrate that inquiries into the intent of the framers of any laws or constitutional amendments are an historical rather than a judicial or legal function

Some remarks on the convergence of the Dirichlet series of L-functions and related questions

First we show that the abscissae of uniform and absolute convergence of Dirichlet series coincide in the case of $L$-functions from the Selberg class $\mathcal{S}$. We also study the latter abscissa inside the extended Selberg class, indicating a different behavior in the two classes. Next we address two questions about majorants of functions in $\mathcal{S}$, showing links with the distribution of the zeros and with independence results.Comment: 10 page