The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History.

• Author: Belz, Herman
• Position: Book Review

The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History By Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Pp. x, 272. $40.00.

The Constitution of Empire is a study of nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion aimed at developing self-governing political communities for admission into the Union. This territorial expansion phase, with the all-important exception that its basic purpose was different, can be considered a U.S. version of a type of political rule that has existed since antiquity--namely, overland empire consisting in subnational colonial units. Although an attempt was eventually made to create an overseas insular-dependency empire on the model of European states, U.S. political principles proved unsuited to this second type of imperial rule. The revival of imperial thinking in the twenty-first century and its application to U.S. foreign policy in particular have resulted from the expansion of U.S. influence in the post-Cold War world.

Although the study under review is limited to one type of imperial expansion, its theoretical scope comprehends issues relevant to contemporary debate over imperialism in world politics and in political life in general. In the deepest sense, The Constitution of Empire is a reflection on whether it is possible to constitute state power for national existence while limiting the exercise of state power for external security needs and other national interests.

The authors approach this fundamental question in a disciplined, methodical, and circumscribed way. They observe that the national government created at the Constitutional Convention continues to exist. The question is whether it has endured as the same republican form of government the Founders intended to create. Most obviously, the country's territorial limits have expanded greatly. Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman focus their study on the question of whether territorial expansion has "taken place pursuant to or outside the bounds of the United States Constitution?" The "dimension of constitutional meaning" is their point of entry into the problem of American national identity (p. 2).

The Constitution of Empire employs an "original meaning" theory of interpretation to test the practices of U.S. territorial expansion. Original meaning is an objective thing that "follows from the nature of the Constitution as a public communications instrument" addressed to a general audience (p. 8). Using this technique, Lawson and Seidman evaluate imperial expansion in two respects: acquisition of territory and territorial governance. Through detailed legal analysis, they show that acquisition of territory is constitutional, as in the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Florida, Texas, Oregon, California, Alaska, and Hawaii. Constitutionally correct means of acquisition include the treaty power, the power to admit new states into the Union, and the powers of conquest, diplomacy, discovery, and statutory annexation. The political end that justifies territorial acquisition...