Contending for American Nationhood

Contending for American Nationhood: Joseph Story and the Debate Over a Federal Common Law offers a study of one of the early republic’s fiercest legal debates, one of the Supreme Court’s most understudied jurists and constitutional theorists, and the enduring tension between two irreconcilable understandings of the American union. It explores the conflict between two competing theories of the American union in the early years of the republic: the Nationalist Theory, which posited that the union was the creation of the national American people, and the Compact Theory, which portrayed the union as a compact between the peoples of the several states who had each separately decided to join to form the union. Benjamin Clark employs this underlying debate as a framework for understanding the debate over federal common law in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The book gives particular attention to the constitutional thought of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, examining how these two seemingly-separate issues—the federal common law question and the existence of American nationhood—came together in Story’s constitutional theory.

Benjamin Clark is a senior lecturer at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia where he teaches courses in political theory and American government.

Introduction: The Question of Nationhood Chapter 1: Origins of the Debate Chapter 2: Story and the Federal Common Law Chapter 3: Story and American Nationhood Chapter 4: Understanding the Opposition to the Federal Common Law Chapter 5: Interpreting the Federal Common Law Debate Chapter 6: The "Swift Doctrine": 1842-1938 Conclusion: Contemporary Relevance of Story's Nationalist Theory