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In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think about the American Founding. Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of Revolutionary liberty-one assuming the Founders invested it with a modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day, the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth to it because it put new cultural capital-a conceptual arsenal of rights and freedoms-at the disposal of ordinary people as well as political factions competing for their support, providing priceless legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal inclusiveness include them in fact.

Under black-letter law declared in the U.S. Supreme Court s decision in Morton v. Mancari, federal classifications of individuals as \"Indian\" based on membership in a federally recognized tribe rely on a political, not a racial, distinction, and so are generally subject only to rational basis review. But the Court recently questioned this longstanding dichotomy, resulting in renewed challenges arguing that because tribal membership usually requires Native ancestry, such classifications are race based. The term \"Indian\" appears twice in the original U.S. Constitution. A large and important scholarly literature has developed arguing that this specific constitutional inclusion of \"Indian Tribes\" mitigates equal protection concerns. Missing from these discussions, however, is much consideration of these terms' meaning at the time of the Constitution's adoption. Most scholars have concluded that there is a lack of evidence on this point—a gap in the historical record. This Article uses legal, intellectual, and cultural history to close that perceived gap and reconstruct the historical meanings of \"tribe\" and \"Indian\" in the late eighteenth century. This Article finds not a single original meaning but duality: Anglo-Americans of the time also alternated between referring to Native communities as \"nations,\" which connoted equality, and \"tribes,\" which conveyed Natives' purported uncivilized status. They also defined \"Indians\" both in racial terms, as nonwhite, and in jurisdictional terms, as noncitizens. These contrasting meanings, I argue, have potentially important doctrinal implications for current debates in Indian law, depending on the interpretive approach applied. Although the term \"tribe\" had at times derogatory connotations, its use in the Constitution bolsters arguments emphasizing the significance of Native descent and arguably weakens current attacks on Native sovereignty based on hierarchies of sovereignty among Native communities. Similarly, there is convincing evidence to read \"Indian\" in the Constitution in political terms, justifying Mancans dichotomy. But interpreting \"Indian\" as a \"racial\" category also provides little solace to Indian law's critics because it fundamentally undermines their insistence on a colorblind Constitution.

The tragic untold story of how a nation struggling for its freedom denied it to one of its own. In 1775, Thomas Jeremiah was one of fewer than five hundred \"Free Negros\" in South Carolina and, with an estimated worth of £1,000 (about $200,000 in today's dollars), possibly the richest person of African descent in British North America. A slaveowner himself, Jeremiah was falsely accused by whites-who resented his success as a Charleston harbor pilot-of sowing insurrection among slaves at the behest of the British. Chief among the accusers was Henry Laurens, Charleston's leading patriot, a slaveowner and former slave trader, who would later become the president of the Continental Congress. On the other side was Lord William Campbell, royal governor of the colony, who passionately believed that the accusation was unjust and tried to save Jeremiah's life but failed. Though a free man, Jeremiah was tried in a slave court and sentenced to death. In August 1775, he was hanged and his body burned. J. William Harris tells Jeremiah's story in full for the first time, illuminating the contradiction between a nation that would be born in a struggle for freedom and yet deny it-often violently-to others.

As far back as the late 1700s, peoples in the United States were developing ways to control infectious disease without infringing on Constitutional rights. Despite acknowledgement that an infected person has certain civil liberties, the history of public health law shows that, in many instances, infectious disease isolation and quarantine proved to be scientifically questionable at best. I examine an historical example of such questionable relationship between public health and civil liberties: the locked ward at Firland Sanatorium in Seattle, Washington. Mandatory quarantine at Firland began in the late 1940s and lasted until the facility closed in the early 1970s. Can examining this history enhance understanding of the relationship between \"the greater good\" and an individual's civil liberties?

Does every increase in the power of government entail a loss of liberty for the people? James H. Read examines how four key Founders--James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson--wrestled with this question during the first two decades of the American Republic. Power versus Liberty reconstructs a four-way conversation--sometimes respectful, sometimes shrill--that touched on the most important issues facing the new nation: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, federal authority versus states' rights, freedom of the press, the controversial Bank of the United States, the relation between nationalism and democracy, and the elusive meaning of \"the consent of the governed.\" Each of the men whose thought Read considers differed on these key questions. Jefferson believed that every increase in the power of government came at the expense of liberty: energetic governments, he insisted, are always oppressive. Madison believed that this view was too simple, that liberty can be threatened either by too much or too little governmental power. Hamilton and Wilson likewise rejected the Jeffersonian view of power and liberty but disagreed with Madison and with each other. The question of how to reconcile energetic government with the liberty of citizens is as timely today as it was in the first decades of the Republic. It pervades our political discourse and colors our readings of events from the confrontation at Waco to the Oklahoma City bombing to Congressional debate over how to spend the government surplus. While the rhetoric of both major political parties seems to posit a direct relationship between the size of our government and the scope of our political freedoms, the debates of Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson confound such simple dichotomies. As Read concludes, the relation between power and liberty is inherently complex.

A paper looks at the trajectory of suffrage reform from the late 18th century to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and argues that reformers were obsessed with the inner qualities of persons. Whereas the 18th century had located a person's capacity for political participation externally, the 19th century found these qualities internally (in innate and heritable traits, such as intelligence). Both enfranchisement and disenfranchisement reflected this change of perspective, this look within. To chart the transformation, the paper examines the debates over suffrage in the state constitutional conventions of the late 18th and 19th centuries, as well as contemporaneous commentaries. The paper is more interested in describing a change in the normative perspective of 19th-century constitutional thought than in explaining the \"instrumental\" motives of the individual actors whom it highlights.

Since I joined the Section after serving on the ABA staff, I have seen it offer a vision of the legal profession not only as advocates of the rule of law but also of the law's application as a tool of justice, equality, and human rights in our society. The United States was founded on eighteenth century versions of human rights that, translated to the twenty-first century by civil rights movements, still define a dynamic nation.