One of the best parts about writing scholarship is when others find it useful in areas you never anticipated. Professor Marc DeGirolami recently discussed “the nationalist providentialism” of Justice Harlan on the Center for Law and Religion Forum.
In a richly detailed new article, Professors Josh Blackman (South Texas) andBrian Frye (Kentucky), together with Michael McCloskey of the Harlan Institute for Constitutional Studies, discuss the constitutional jurisprudence of Justice John Marshall Harlan by exploring his turn-of-the-century lectures at what was then the Columbian College of Law (now GW). My old students will remember Justice Harlan for, among other opinions, his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. The paper is very interesting on many fronts, but the authors’ reconstruction of Harlan’s nationalist providentialism (Harlan himself, the authors write, was a “devout Presbyterian”) really caught my eye (particularly in light of a paper I am now working on involving a contemporary judge with not entirely dissimilar views).
Thanks for the shout-out!