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Tuesday, August 09, 2022

Intoxicating Liquors

I'm teaching a new seminar this Fall centered on Robert Jackson. This is an experiment, as I've never taught a class on one personsingle person. But what an extraordinary career to cover.

As part of my preparation, I was reading Jackson's testimony to the Senate in support of FDR's Court-packing plan. At one point, he argued that the courts should defer to Congress's definition of "general welfare," "due process of law," and "commerce among the several states" as they did to the definition of "intoxicating liquors" under the Eighteenth Amendment. This leads to a wonderful thought experiment about how people could have instead tried to determine the original public meaning of intoxicating liquors in 1919. Now there's a project!

Posted by Gerard Magliocca on August 9, 2022 at 12:56 PM | Permalink

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