Nearly a million people dead and counting. More than 77 million infected, a little less than one-fifth of the total infections worldwide.1 The United States has had more deaths than any other country, and its COVID-19 death rate of 276 per 100,000 people is the highest among the world’s wealthiest nations.2 Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are hospitalized and die at significantly higher rates than whites.3 Some bright lights exist too, one being the speedy development of vaccines and their deployment in 2021 – although there, too, both the national government and the states have sometimes stumbled.4 Another is legislative enactment of major fiscal measures which sustained individuals and businesses in the face of economy calamity.5 Still, by many public health measures, the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a governmental failure.

Expressly political literature in the period of the Revolution and early republic attempts to balance, synthesize, or overcome the contradiction between the language of universal freedom and the nascent and evolving national institutions of domination, exploitation, and general unfreedom. In the early republic’s modern, specifically capitalist form of national law, the literary vehicle is inseparable from the emergent institutional form, and this essay argues that the early republic thus initiates a considerably new phase in the nexus of rhetorical expression and social power. Through readings of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and key texts from the ratification debate, the essay traces the invention of a state machinery uniquely suited not primarily to overt domination over citizen-subjects, but rather to their exploitation by private actors formally extrinsic to the state – an apparatus writ small, in the grammar, syntax, and distinctive diction of the primary political texts.

This chapter examines the influence of Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta and several later medieval sources set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. Magna Carta inspired sixteenth-century Puritan dissenters in Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century English jurists like Sir Edward Coke and Puritan pamphleteers like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the Charter. Magna Carta also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, including notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, and many of the rights provisions in the American Declaration of Independence, the original state constitutions, and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This chapter examines the influence of Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta and several later medieval sources set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. Magna Carta inspired sixteenth-century Puritan dissenters in Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century English jurists like Sir Edward Coke and Puritan pamphleteers like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the Charter. Magna Carta also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, including notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, and many of the rights provisions in the American Declaration of Independence, the original state constitutions, and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.B1:L8

In 1700 about 250,000 European colonists and enslaved Africans lived in North America, primarily along a thin strip of land bordering the Atlantic Ocean. By 1870 these scattered colonial settlements had been consolidated into two continental nations – the United States and Canada – with a combined population of more than 40 million. Although agriculture remained the leading employer in North America in 1870, the rapid growth of industry was transforming these nations into increasingly urban and industrial societies and contributing to the accelerating growth of living standards. This chapter locates the sources of this remarkable growth in the interactions of abundant natural resources, a responsive economic and political system, and sustained technological progress. Yet the story of these years is not solely one of economic success. From the perspective of the aboriginal peoples of North America, European settlement and expansion had tragic consequences. So, too, the experience of enslaved Africans and their descendants was one of remarkable hardships. Slavery proved a source of continuing political tensions that resulted in a destructive and costly civil war and left a legacy of racial segregation and tensions that are still palpable today.

turns to immigrant citizenship with a focus on California to carefully assess where the state currently stands with respect to progressive state citizenship and to situate the present moment in a sweep of the state’s history, which saw it pioneer and champion anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant legislation from its founding through the late 1990s and only move toward more pro-immigrant policies in the last two decades. We then explore key milestones in immigrant rights over the past decade and pinpoint 2015 as the year when progressive state citizenship became crystallized. Finally, we trace key factors that incubated and enabled the development of progressive state citizenship in California, including voter backlash against racial propositions, partisan shifts in the state legislature, and the growing strength of social movement actors across various regions, aided by long-term investment strategies by private foundations.

focuses on the particular case of the United States and the development of national citizenship and state citizenship over time. Following the lead of other works in American history and American Political Development, the authors lay out three major periods in federated citizenship that follow significant developments in the US Constitution and federal law: the Framers’ period, stretching from the Articles of Confederation and the founding Constitution through the Civil War; the Reconstruction period’s establishment and subsequent collapse of national control ensuring the provision of those citizenship rights under Jim Crow; and the Civil Rights period, starting with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and subsequent extensions and contractions in citizenship rights provided at the national and state levels along lines of race, gender, immigrant status, and sexual orientation.

The United States does not yet have a comprehensive legal regime to manage germline editing. However, the US Congress, which appropriates funds annually to support the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has enacted a rider that prevents the agency from using those funds to receive applications for clinical trials. In this manner, Congress has imposed a de facto moratorium that prevents scientists from creating children with modified genomes. In most of the fifty states, scientists remain free to edit human gametes and embryos in the lab as long as they mind federal regulations governing research. In the future, Congress and state legislatures may ban germline editing, in whole or in part. Such bans may face legal challenges. To be sure, the United States has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and is not bound by its requirement that parties respect scientific freedom. Nor does the US Constitution expressly state a right to engage in scientific research. However, some academics argue that such a right can be derived from the First Amendment. Further, those who cannot conceive a healthy child without germline editing may claim that a ban violates their constitutional right to privacy.