Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Nullification: Citizens do not need lawyers and judges to tell them what THEIR Constitution means.”

 
 
A review of Nullification: Reclaiming the Consent of the Governed by Clyde Wilson, Shotwell Press, 2016.

As a young conservative, I came across ideas like nullification and states’ rights, during my studies.

But they were always passed over, as if they didn’t mean anything anymore. When I read Robert Bork’s excellent book on Originalism, I never saw his unquestioned and unstated premise: that the it is the job of federal judges to decide upon the Constitution. I was never quite so aware of how much we have forgotten about America’s constitutional tradition, as I was when reading Dr. Clyde Wilson’s latest work.

Dr. Wilson’s work Nullification is 10 chapters in length. Most are brief, filled with prose that hits you like a lightweight boxer. No sooner is the reader struck once by a line than another one. Time after time, he takes cherished notions and leaves them in ruins. He fills pages with historical retelling and terse applications of the truth to the present.

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