Abstract
In his book Hidden Laws: How State Constitutions Stabilize American Politics, Robinson Woodward-Burns presents a history of constitutional revision at both the state and the federal levels that will be of interest to scholars of American political development, history, constitutional law, and federalism. Hidden Laws engages an infrequently studied topic, US state constitutions, and argues that the ability to amend state constitutions more easily than the US Constitution has played an important role in stabilizing American politics. Woodward-Burns divides US politics into six time periods for study based on the issues that dominated American politics at the time and the ways in which change preceded at the time (1760–1791, 1792–1849, 1850–1877, 1878–1931, 1932–1979, 1980–2020). It is an ambitious project to categorize and explore all proposed state and federal constitutional amendments from 1760 to 2020, and Woodward-Burns does so without overwhelming the reader. He manages this by emphasizing a few essential political debates that defined each constitutional era, tracing the patterns of how they were discussed and advanced to reveal the essential patterns of the time.
In doing so he demonstrates four patterns in American constitutional development that he terms: preemption (national action preventing state debate), devolution (national inaction moving reform to the state level), elevation (state level conflict forces national level action), and obviation (when all action happens at the state level). He shows how different patterns of change played out both on different issues and in different eras. Using these patterns allows the author to show how issues moved between the state and federal levels, resulting in the stability of the federal Constitution. He also helps identify the factors that cause different patterns of political change at and between the state and federal levels. In doing so, he moves us past the simple narrative that Article V makes amending the US Constitution very difficult and shows us the rich array of factors that influence constitutional reforms, and returns state-level dynamics to a prominent place in American constitutional discourse.
Stand out chapters for me were Woodward-Burns’ treatment of the first Constitutional conventions, antebellum politics, and Reconstruction. He dispels myths of how the executive and legislative branches were shaped at the Philadelphia Convention, demonstrating how bicameralism, a unitary executive, and the scope of executive power were informed by the constitutional practices of the states. The famous debates over the Bank of the United States take on a new vibrance when places in the context of state charting of banks between 1792 and the 1820s. Nullification, the failed tool of states’ rights vehemently championed by John C Calhoun, receives a richer treatment than in typical scholarship. Woodward-Burns leads his reader to see it not a peculiarity of a moment, but a tool embraced by politicians both North and South as the young nation determined how its components related to each other.
Scholars with a greater interest in the last 150 years will find his chapters on the Progressive Era, the expansion of the welfare state, and attempts at Constitutional reform since 1980 informative and compelling. These chapters explore important moments in US history, including temperance/prohibition, the creation of the income tax, the New Deal, the property tax revolt of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the failure of the Equal Rights and Balanced Budget Amendments. By the final chapters, modern debates and the failed procedural reforms of the 1980s and 1990s are seen not as something new, but as the latest movements situated in political dynamics as old as The Republic.
Woodward-Burns doesn’t ask the reader to take him at this word regarding the thousands of state and national amendments introduced in the 260 years he studies. His narrative is supplemented throughout with numerous tables and graphs detailing what amendments were being introduced when and where. They provide an excellent complement to his accessible writing style, making the numerous politicians, movements, famous figures, and forgotten activists easy to recognize and engage as a reader.
Previous scholarship has focused heavily on the US Constitution, so this project expands the analysis and in doing so enriches our understanding of American constitutional development. It helps us understand state level constitutional reform, as well as the local and national factors that cause state level reform to happen more in some era—and with some topics—than others. The book will appeal to a broad range of scholars in American political development, constitutional law, political theory, and American history. It will also be a valuable resource in teaching American political history and constitutional development, both because of the trends it reveals and the essential background political background it provides regarding the Founding and Civil War eras. The latter background is why I plan to use it in my American political thought class going forward.
