Notre Dame Law School NDLScholarship Journal Articles Publications 1997 A Twentieth Amendment Parable John C. Nagle Notre Dame Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship Part of the Constitutional Law Commons Recommended Citation John C. Nagle, A Twentieth Amendment Parable, 72 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 470 (1997). Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/545 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ESSAY A TWENTIETH AMENDMENT PARABLE JOHN COPELAND NAGLE* INTRODUCTION Once upon a time, there was a constitutional amendment that had avoided all of the disputes characteristic of constitutional law. The Supreme Court had never even mentioned it. Only four district court decisions had in any sense turned on the Amendment's mean- ing.' Law schools did not hold symposia exploring the subtleties of the Amendment. The definitive law review article on the Amend- ment had yet to be written.2 The most attention the Amendment re- ceived was as an example of a constitutional provision so straightforward that it generated few of the interpretive controversies 3 that lurked elsewhere in the Constitution. * Associate Professor of Law, Seton Hall University. B.A., 1982, Indiana University; J.D., 1986, University of Michigan. I am indebted to Akhil Amar, Barbara Armacost, Phil Frickey, Abner Greene, Ed Hartnett, Sanford Levinson, Lisa Nagle, Mike Paulsen, De- anell Tacha, and Bill Treanor, each of whom offered many helpful suggestions and com- ments on this Essay.