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Editor’s Note: In July, 2024, The University of Pennsylvania Press published Sarah Gronningsater’s The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom, which won the 2025 James A. Rawley Prize and earned an Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, both from The Organization of American Historians. Recently, Gronningsater…

In his 2025 Inaugural Address to the nation, President Trump declared, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” Later that afternoon, he signed an Executive Order limiting the federal definition of gender. Within two weeks, the president had…

In November, 2024, Yale University Press published Simon Rabinovitch’s book, Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History. The book is distinctive in its comparative, global approach to telling the story of Jewish people’s pursuit of legal sovereignty over several centuries. This spring, Professor Rabinovitch shared some thoughts about the book with The Docket. The Docket…

For observers of academic legal discourse, the invocation of “natural law” in recent scholarship ought to seem somewhat unremarkable. Since the publication of Adrian Vermeuele’s 2020 essay in The Atlantic, “Beyond Originalism,” in fact, natural law—and especially its relevance to modern constitutional interpretation—has become a frequent subject of debate in the legal academy. From Vermeule’s…

A discerning audience member noticed the slip. They’re bright yellow and familiar to those who know The National Archives in London. I had put together some slides to talk about my recent book, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation. We all have our own archiving systems. Mine is fairly…

Deliberation governed by rules of procedure is a mainstay of constitution writing in the American states. Following the federal example, each of the fifty states has had at least one constitutional convention[1] in the course of its history, where delegates from a state gathered to deliberate and collectively author that state’s foundational text. As Jon…