Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-thh2z Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-25T10:14:21.191Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Constitutionalization as Statecraft: Vagrant Nation and the Modern American State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Karen M. Tani
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay showcases the contribution of Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation (2016) to one field of scholarship that the book scarcely mentions: the historical literature on the American state. In Goluboff's account of the fall of the “vagrancy law regime” in the “long 1960s” I see vital questions about the nature of the modern American state and the endurance of older, seemingly antithetical modes of governance. Given the trends that state-focused scholars have illuminated—for example, toward centralization of power and the protection of individual rights—what allowed for vague, locally enforced vagrancy laws to survive so late into the twentieth century? What ultimately triggered their demise? In mining Vagrant Nation for answers, this essay also urges scholars to contemplate “constitutionalization” as a form of statecraft. In giving a constitutional law framing to the grievances of “vagrants,” federal courts reinforced key tenets of the modern American state, including the supremacy of national law over competing legal orders and the desirability of being a rights-bearing member of the nation-state. Simultaneously, these court decisions left open other, more “modern” possibilities for regulating the kinds of people (poor, nonwhite, unpopular) whom vagrancy laws once ensnared.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , Fall 2018 , pp. 1646 - 1657
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Agee, Christopher Lowen. “From the Vagrancy Law Regime to the Carceral State.” Law and Social Inquiry 43, no. 4 (2018): 1658–1668.Google Scholar
Bach, Wendy A. “The Hyperregulatory State: Women, Race, Poverty and Support.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 25, no. 2 (2014): 1–75.Google Scholar
Bach, Wendy A. “Poor Support/Rich Support: (Re)Viewing the American Social Welfare State.” Florida Tax Review 20 (2017): 495–550.Google Scholar
Balogh, Brian. A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Balogh, Brian. The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Bridges, Khiara M. The Poverty of Privacy Rights, 1st ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Capozzola, Christopher. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Dauber, Michele Landis. The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Downs, Gregory, and Masur, Kate, eds. The World the Civil War Made. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura F. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura F. “Sarah Allingham's Sheet and Other Lessons from Legal History.” Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (2018): 121–47.Google Scholar
Ernst, Daniel R. “Law and American Political Development, 1877–1938.” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 205–19.Google Scholar
Failinger, Marie A., and Rosser, Ezra, eds. The Poverty Law Canon. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Francis, Megan Ming. Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul. “Law and American Political Development.” Law and Social Inquiry 33, no. 3 (2008): 779–803.Google Scholar
Gerstle, Gary. Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Gilliom, John. Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa. “Won't You Please Help Me Get My Son Home?: Peonage, Patronage, and Protest in the World War II Urban South.” Law and Social Inquiry 24 (1999): 777–806.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa. “Lawyers, Law, and the New Civil Rights History.” Harvard Law Review 126 (2013): 2312–35.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa. Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Gustafson, Kaaryn S. Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty. New York: New York University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Handler, Joel F., and Hasenfeld, Yeheskel. Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Johnson, Kimberley S. Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Kato, Daniel. Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Kersch, Ken I. Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Kersch, Ken I. “The New Deal Triumph as the End of History?” In The Supreme Court and American Political Development, edited by Kahn, Ronald and Kersch, Ken I., 169–226. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006.Google Scholar
King, Desmond, and Lieberman, Robert C. “The American State.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, edited by Valelly, Richard M., Mettler, Suzanne, and Lieberman, Robert C., 231–58. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Mehrotra, Ajay K. Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877–1929. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Michelmore, Molly C. Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Nackenoff, Carol. “Constitutionalizing the Terms of Inclusion: Friends of the Indian and Citizenship for Native Americans, 1880–1930s.” In The Supreme Court and American Political Development, edited by Kahn, Ronald and Kersch, Ken I., 366–413. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006.Google Scholar
Nackenoff, Carol, and Novkov, Julie, eds. Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Nice, Julie A. “No Scrutiny Whatsoever: Deconstitutionalization of Poverty Law, Dual Rules of Law & Dialogic Default.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 35 (2008): 629–71.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. “The Legal Origins of the Modern American State.” In Looking Back at Law's Century, edited by Sarat, Austin, Garth, Bryant, and Kagan, Robert A., 249–83. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State.” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752–72.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. “The Concept of the State in American History.” In The Boundaries of the State in U.S. History, edited by Sparrow, James T., Novak, William J., and Sawyer, Stephen W., 325–49. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. A New Democracy: Law and the Creation of the Modern American State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Novkov, Julie. “Understanding Law as a Democratic Institution Through US Constitutional Development.” Law and Social Inquiry 40, no. 3 (2015): 811–32.Google Scholar
Ocen, Priscilla A. “The New Racially Restrictive Covenant: Race, Welfare, and the Policing of Black Women in Subsidized Housing.” UCLA Law Review 59 (2012): 1540–83.Google Scholar
Orren, Karen, and Skowronek, Stephen. The Search for American Political Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Pearson, Susan J. “A New Birth of Regulation: The State of the State After the Civil War.” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 3 (2015): 422–39.Google Scholar
Piven, Frances Fox, and Cloward, Richard A. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971.Google Scholar
Reich, Charles A. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73, no. 5 (1964): 733–87.Google Scholar
Reich, Charles A. “Beyond the New Property: An Ecological View of Due Process Symposium: The Legacy of Goldberg v. Kelly: A Twenty Year Perspective.” Brooklyn Law Review 56 (1990): 731–46.Google Scholar
Schiller, Reuel Edward. “‘Saint George and the Dragon’: Courts and the Development of the Administrative State in Twentieth-Century America.” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 1 (2005): 110–24.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Skrentny, John. “Law and the American State.” Annual Review of Sociology 32 (2006): 213–44.Google Scholar
Smith, Anna Marie. “The Sexual Regulation Dimension of Contemporary Welfare Law: A Fifty State Overview.” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 8 (2002): 121–218.Google Scholar
Sparrow, James T. Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Sparrow, James T., Novak, William J., and Sawyer, Stephen W., eds. Boundaries of the State in US History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Steffes, Tracy L. School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Tani, Karen M. “Welfare and Rights Before the Movement: Rights as a Language of the State.” Yale Law Journal 122 (2012): 314–83.Google Scholar
Tani, Karen M. States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Tani, Karen M. “From the Well-Regulated Society to the Modern American State.” American Journal of Legal History 57, no. 2 (2017): 243–47Google Scholar
University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty. Who Is Poor? 2016. Accessed April 24, 2018. https://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm Google Scholar
Whittington, Keith E. “Law and the Courts.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, edited by Valelly, Richard M., Mettler, Suzanne, and Lieberman, Robert C., 309–26. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
Papachristou v. Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972).Google Scholar
King v. Smith, 392 U.S. 309 (1968).Google Scholar
Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958).Google Scholar