Saturday, January 14, 2012

Beyond Originalism: Conservative Declarationism and Constitutional Redemption - Ken Kersch | Maryland Law Review

Boston College political science professor Ken I. Kersch seeks to redeem conservative jurisprudence from the mortal sin of racism by grounding constitutional theory in the embrace of the Declaration of Independence as vindicated by the post civil war amendments 13, 14, and 15.
Embracing the natural law vision of the 18th century he develops a nationalist, quasi-religious originalism to save conservative jurisprudence from the white southern strategy that has dominated the modern Republican Party. - GWC

Beyond Originalism: Conservative Declarationism and Constitutional Redemption

by Ken Kersch
UM Carey Law | Maryland Law Review Volume 71, Issue 1:
The Declarationist narrative I have described here represents one strain of the constitutional nationalism forged by the contemporary conservative movement, with the aim of forming movement identities and allegiances, and distinguishing friends from enemies. It positions contemporary conservatives—and the Republican Party—as
the true heirs and guardians of the legacy of the American Founders, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Far from signaling a (wholly) reactionary return to pre-civil rights movement neoConfederatism, contemporary conservative Declarationism—with sometimes millennialist overtones—looks to the present, and, especially, the future. It emphasizes sin, and redemption, with a very modern focus on the sin of racism. It explains to conservatives the ways in which, through their rock-solid commitment to the first principles of the Declaration, they are the legatees of the Great Men who founded the Great Nation, and then redeemed it from the evil of chattel slavery, and from the sin of racial segregation.
h/t Balkinization 

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