Cooley’s Constitutional Limitations and Constitutional Originalism

Cooley’s Constitutional Limitations and

Constitutional Originalism

LAWRENCE B. SOLUM*

ABSTRACT

Thomas Cooley’s A Treatise on The Constitutional Limitations Which Rest

upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union was the most

inf‌luential treatise of constitutional law in the second half of the nineteenth cen-

tury. This Essay explores the ideas expressed in Cooley’s treatise in light of

contemporary originalist constitutional theory. In many ways, Constitutional

Limitations anticipated some of the key moves made by contemporary public

meaning originalists, including the interpretation-construction distinction and

the idea that ordinary meaning, and not technical meaning, is the baseline for

constitutional interpretation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

I. CONTEMPORARY CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

II. COOLEY AND PUBLIC MEANING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

A. The Public Meaning Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

B. Cooley’s View of Meaning in “Constitutional Limitations” . . . 59

III. COOLEY AND THE INTERPRETATION-CONSTRUCTION DISTINCTION. . 61

A. The Interpretation-Construction Distinction in Contemporary

Originalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

B. Cooley’s Position on the Interpretation-Construction

Distinction in “Constitutional Limitations”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

C. Cooley and Construction Zones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

IV. COOLEY AND THE CONSTRAINT PRINCIPLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

A. The Constraint Principle in Contemporary Constitutional

Theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

* Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. © 2020, Lawrence

B. Solum. Permission is hereby granted to make copies of this Article in whole or in part for educational

and scholarly purposes, including copies in electronic form that are made publicly available.

49

B. Cooley on Constraint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

V. COOLEY AND EXTRATEXTUAL SOURCES OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW . . 69

A. An Originalist Account of the Role of Extratextual Sources of

Constitutional Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

B. Cooley and Common Law Limitations on Legislative Power . . 71

VI. A BRIEF DIGRESSION ON HOLISM AND MODULARITY IN

CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY AND THEORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

INTRODUCTION

Thomas Cooley, the author of A Treatise on The Constitutional Limitations

Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union,

1

is

surely an important f‌igure in American constitutional history.

2

But many of his

central ideas seem outdated, irrelevant, and even pernicious from the perspective

of the dominant strains of contemporary constitutional theory in the legal acad-

emy.

3

The mainstream appraisal of Cooley ref‌lects the fact that living

1. THOMAS M. COOLEY, A TREATISE ON THE CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS WHICH REST UPON THE

LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE STATES OF THE AMERICAN UNION 58 (Boston, Little, Brown, & Co. 1868)

[hereinafter CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS]. Citations are to this edition, unless specif‌ically noted.

2. See, e.g., Samuel R. Olken, Justice George Sutherland and Economic Liberty: Constitutional

Conservatism and the Problem of Factions, 6 WM. & MARY BILL RTS. J. 1, 7 (1997) (Cooley and others

“exerted enormous inf‌luence over members of the judiciary and the bar for more than half a century.”);

LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN, A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LAW 545 (1973) (describing CONSTITUTIONAL

LIMITATIONS as “the most important book for its own generation.”); Andrew McLaughlin, Thomas

McIntyre Cooley, 4 DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY 392 (Alan Johnson & Dumas Malone eds.,

1930) (describing CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS as “the chiefest American law book”); Book Note, 27

ALB. L. REV. 300 (1883) (“It is impossible to exaggerate CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS’s merits. It is an

ideal treatise, and not only a standard authority, but almost exclusively sovereign in its sphere. It is cited

in every argument and opinion on the subjects of which it treats, and not only is the book authoritative as

a digest of the law, but its author’s opinions are regarded as almost conclusive.”); David J. Barron, The

Promise of Cooley’s City: Traces of Local Constitutionalism, 147 U. PA. L. REV. 487, 509 (1999)

(“Cooley . . . was perhaps the leading constitutional theorist of his age.”); Clark B. Lombardi,

Nineteenth-Century Free Exercise Jurisprudence and the Challenge of Polygamy: The Relevance of

Nineteenth-Century Cases and Commentaries for Contemporary Debates About Free Exercise

Exemptions, 85 OR. L. REV. 369, 415 (2006) (characterizing CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS “as a

leading authority on constitutional law.”); David S. Law, Generic Constitutional Law, 89 MINN. L. REV.

652, 709 (2005) (CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS was “the best-selling law book of its time, and widely

cited by judges and practitioners alike”); David T. Hardy, The Rise and Demise of the “Collective

Right” Interpretation of the Second Amendment, 59 CLEV. ST. L. REV. 315, 340 (2011) (describing

Cooley as the “leading constitutional commentator of the period”); William J. Fleener, Jr . . ., Thomas

McIntyre Cooley: Michigan’s Most Inf‌luential Lawyer, 79 MICH. B.J. 208, 209 (2000) (characterizing

Cooley as “Michigan’s most inf‌luential lawyer”).

3. See, e.g., LAURENCE H. TRIBE, AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 571 n.4 (2d ed. 1988)

(connecting Cooley with Lochner); JAMES W. HURST, THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN LAW: THE LAW

50 THE GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 18:49