Madisonian Equal Protection

Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2004 Madisonian Equal Protection James S. Liebman Columbia Law School, [email protected] Brandon L. Garrett Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation James S. Liebman & Brandon L. Garrett, Madisonian Equal Protection, 104 COLUM. L. REV 837 (2004). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/120 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW VOL. 104 MAY 2004 NO. 4 ARTICLES MADISONIAN EQUAL PROTECTION James S. Liebman* & Brandon L. Garrett** James Madison is considered the "Fatherof the Constitution," but his progeny disappointed him. It had no effective defense against self-government's "mortal disease"--the oppression of minorities by local majorities. This Article explores Madison's writings in an effort to reclaim the deep con- ception of equal protection at the core of his constitutional aspirations. At the Convention, Madison passionately advocated a radical structural ap- proach to equal protection under which the "extended republic's" broadlyfo- cused legislaturewould have monitored local laws and vetoed those that were parochialand "unjust." Rejecting this proposal to structure equal protection into the "interior"operation of government, the Framers instead adopted "ex- terior" admonitions againststate ex post facto laws, impairment of contracts, and the like. Expanding this strategy, the Fourteenth Amendment admon- ished states against all denials of "the equal protection of the laws." Exactly as Madison predicted, however, protection of local minorities cannot be en- trusted to "dim and doubtful" words enforced after the fact by courts that are inaccessible to minorities and too distantfrom the people at large to have the knowledge and confidence to resist powerful local majorities. This is particu- larly so of late, as the courts have placed vast spheres of activity off limits to the extended republic and denied it the power to enlist state officials in imple- menting nationalpolicy. By rediscoveringMadison's neglected thinking on equal protection, and his elaborate design for a constitution that was never enacted, this Article sheds new light on seemingly intractableproblems of federalism and equal protection and paves the way for a modern revival of Madisonian Equal Protection. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................. 839 I. RECLAIMING MADISON'S CONSTITUTIONAL MOTIVATION ...... 842 A. Setting Straight the Scholarly Record ................. 844 B. Appreciating Madison's Skepticism About "His" Constitution ......................................... 850 II. HARMONIZING LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY ......... 852 * Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. ** Associate, Cochran Neufeld & Scheck, LLP. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Kerry Abrams, Vincent Blasi, Bryan R. Diederich, Michael Doff, Archon Fung, Bradley C. Karkkainen, Henry P. Monaghan, Dara O'Rourke, Charles Sabel, William Simon, and Susan Sturm. COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 104:837 A. The Emerging Synthesis of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity ............................................ 852 B. Madisonian Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity .......... 857 1. Liberty ........................................... 858 2. Equality .......................................... 861 a. Distinctions Based on Beliefs or Opinions .... 864 b. Distinctions Based on Personal Status ......... 867 c. Distinctions Among Divergent Interests ....... 871 3. Fraternity ........................................ 874 4. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ....................... 876 III. THE FIRST CONSTITUTION'S STRUCTURAL EQUAL PROTECTION CONSTRAINT .............................................. 878 A. Madisonian Psychology and Mechanics ................ 878 B. The Extended Republic as Structural Equal Protection Constraint ........................................... 881 IV. MADISON VERSUS THE FIRST CONSTITUTION'S FLAWED FEDERALISM .............................................. 885 A. The "Vices" of the Existing Arrangement That Required a New Constitution ......................... 886 B. The Vice of the Constitution as Revealed by The Federalist No. 51 ...................................... 890 C. Madison's (and Hamilton's and Wilson's) More Perfect Constitution ......................................... 899 1. Alexander Hamilton's Solution ................... 899 2. James W ilson's Solution .......................... 901 3. Madison's National Negative ..................... 902 a. The Need for the Negative ................... 903 b. The Ameliorative Operation of the Veto ...... 904 4. Cooperative Federalism .......................... 909 5. Madison's Near Miss: The National Negative at the Convention ...................................... 913 V. THE SECOND CONSTITUTION'S FLAWED EQUAL PROTECTION CONSTRAINT .............................................. 919 A. Our (Madisonian?) Fourteenth Amendment .......... 919 1. Madison's Fourteenth Amendment ............... 919 2. Our Fourteenth Amendment ..................... 922 a. Interposing a Will Independent of the M ajority ...................................... 923 b. Encouraging Virtue .......................... 926 c. Mobilizing Courts Against All Unjust Expedients ................................... 929 B. Our Incomplete Constitution ......................... 931 1. The Weakness of the Judiciary ............. ...... 932 2. The Courts' Dangerous, Enervating Distance from the People ....................................... 935 2004] MADISONIAN EQUAL PROTECTION 839 3. The Thin Admonitory Force of "Parchment" G eneralities ...................................... 938 C. The Disappointing History of Our Un-Madisonian Equal Protection Clause .............................. 942 VI. DILUTING THE EXTENDED REPUBLIC'S (INCOMPLETE) STRUCTURAL EQUAL PROTECTION ............................ 948 A. Federal Versus State Race-Conscious Affirmative Action Program s ............................................ 948 B. The Power of Congress to Regulate State Injustices and Supersede or Harness State Authority ............ 950 1. State Sovereignty Versus Congressional Sovereignty ...................................... 951 a. Congressional Power to Define Actionable State Injustices ............................... 951 b. Congressional Power to Regulate State Injustices Free of State Sovereign Immunity and Other Federalism-Based Constraints ...... 951 c. Congress's Power to Harness State Regulatory Capacity in Service of Its Own ................ 954 2. The Modern Court and the Madisonian Constitution ..................................... 955 VII. LOOKING FORWARD ......................................... 962 A. Madisonian Foresight ................................ 962 B. Madisonian Impracticality, in Hindsight .............. 964 C. An Exercise in Madisonian Foresight ................. 967 D. The Legacy of Madisonian Equal Protection .......... 971 CONCLUSION .................................................... 974 INTRODUCTION The framing of the original Constitution reveals far more about equal protection than the doctrine's absence from the document would seem to imply. Indeed, a vision of equal protection deeply motivated the actions of James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution,"' at the time of the framing. As Madison wrote to George Washington before the Con- stitutional Convention, one of the main innovations he sought in the newly constituted government was a national negative or veto of state law 1. Charles F. Hobson, The Negative on State Laws: James Madison, the Constitution, and the Crisis of Republican Government, 36 Win. & Mary Q. (3d ser.) 215, 215 (1979) (stating that Madison "has been justly acclaimed 'Father of the Constitution'"); see also Edward McNall Burns, James Madison: Philosopher of the Constitution 10-11 (1938) (noting Madison's disproportionately large contribution to the framing); Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, at 53 (1990) [hereinafter Rakove, James Madison] ("None of the fifty-five members of the Federal Convention contributed more to the framing of the Constitution than James Madison."). COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 104:837 by Congress to curtail state-level "aggressions of interested majorities on 2 the rights of minorities." The constitution Madison envisioned, however, is not the one the Framers wrote. To his great disappointment, the nation's first constitution omitted any explicit equal protection constraint on the states, and it excluded the national negative he had fervently promoted. Nor, as we will see, did Madison's constitution emerge eighty years later with the Equal Protection Clause and the other postbellum amendments. This Article recalls the constitution Madison wanted in order to en- rich our understanding of Madison's thinking and to credit his prescient belief that the constitution the nation originally framed was-and the one that replaced it in 1868 remains-gravely defective for lack of an effective equal protection constraint. In so doing, the Article does not contend

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