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The Constitution in Congress: The Federalist Period, 1789-1801

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David Currie, a (beloved) professor at the University of Chicago Law School and perhaps the nation's foremost constitutional historians, launched this project to explain how the Constitution has been interpreted and applied, in practice, throughout our history. The modern law student learns constitutional law through cases, and one would be foregiven if he thought that John Marshall and Joseph Story decided most questions of constitutional interpretation over our first fifty years. Yet, Currie explains, Congress and the President did far more to shape our understanding of the Constitution through their own mutual and self restraints. Madison helped write the document, for example, but he also had to live under it, both as a Congressman and later as President. He did not stop interpreting and shaping the document when the ink dried.

Currie walks through the first dozen years of the nation under the Constitution and shows how Congress in particular interpreted it. Such questions, of course, arose constantly in those early years (still do?), but Currie puts them in context, and explains how and why different interpretations were accepted and enforced. Perhaps the best thing Currie does is to demonstrate that, once again, there is really quite little under the sun in terms of Constitutional interpretation. Many of the issues that the Supreme Court eventually visited in the past 200 years were anticipated by Congressional debates in the first dozen. Congressman took the floor and explained the issues every bit as clearly as the Court would many years hence -- sometimes even better.

Currie doesn't write like a law professor. His wit, coupled with an obvious love of the subject matter, is apparent on every page. He is working on further editions that will add future time periods.

Like Kurland and Lerner's *Founder's Constitution,* Currie's *Constitution in Congress* series will soon become a required staple of every legal scholar's bookshelf.