Christopher W. Schmidt Copyright (c) 2011 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt Recent documents in Christopher W. Schmidt en-us Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:37:19 PST 3600 The Tea Party and the Constitution http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/35 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/35 Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:47:17 PST Christopher W. Schmidt Law and Society http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/34 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/34 Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:41:58 PST Christopher W. Schmidt Book Review, (reviewing Kevern Verney & Lee Sartain eds., Long Is the Way and Hard (2009)) http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/33 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/33 Wed, 11 May 2011 08:44:12 PDT Christopher W. Schmidt Legal History Book Review, (reviewing Mildred Wigfall Robinson & Richard J. Bonnie eds., Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education (2009)) http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/32 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/32 Wed, 11 May 2011 08:41:49 PDT Christopher W. Schmidt Legal History Book Review (reviewing Anders Walker, The s Used BrowGhost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderaten v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights) (2009) http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/31 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/31 Wed, 11 May 2011 08:36:50 PDT Christopher W. Schmidt Civil Rights Popular Constitutionalism on the Right: Lessons from the Tea Party (forthcoming) (symposium) http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/30 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/30 Wed, 11 May 2011 08:28:06 PDT Christopher W. Schmidt Constitutional Law The Tea Party and the Constitution http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/29 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/29 Sat, 19 Mar 2011 06:41:32 PDT This Article considers the Tea Party as a constitutional movement. I explore the Tea Party’s ambitious effort to transform the role of the Constitution in American life, examining both the substance of the Tea Party’s constitutional claims and the tactics movement leaders have embraced for advancing these claims. No major social movement in modern American history has so explicitly tied its reform agenda to the Constitution. From the time when the Tea Party burst onto the American political scene in early 2009, its supporters claimed in no uncertain terms that much recent federal government action overstepped constitutionally defined limitations. A belief that the Constitution establishes clear boundaries on federal power is at the core of the Tea Party’s constitutional vision.

Yet the most distinctive—and I believe ultimately the most significant—aspect of the Tea Party’s constitutional vision is not necessarily the specifics of its constitutional claims (these ideas have long been common currency in conservative and libertarian circles), but the distinctly non-judicial and participatory approach the Tea Party has taken to its project of constitutional reform. The Tea Party offers a powerful case study what a recent generation of scholarship has identified as “popular constitutionalism.” Its constitutional agenda has little role for the courts. Tea Party activists have been strikingly successful in locating arenas of constitutional activism that do not depend upon the formal apparatus of the law, such as judges, lawyers, and complex legal doctrine. Rather than litigation, the Tea Party has pursued an agenda of constitutional practice focused on educational outreach and political mobilization. After describing the key elements of Tea Party constitutionalism, with a focus on the extrajudicial mechanisms through which the Tea Party has advanced its constitutional agenda, I conclude with an assessment of the possible impact of the Tea Party on constitutional law and practice, as well as its implications for future scholarship on popular constitutional mobilization.

]]> Christopher W. Schmidt Constitutional Law Legal History Conceptions of Law in the Civil Rights Movement (forthcoming) http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/28 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/28 Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:13:07 PST Christopher W. Schmidt Civil Rights Oral Dissenting on the Supreme Court http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/27 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/27 Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:45:59 PST Christopher W. Schmidt et al. Constitutional Law The Sit-ins and the State Action Doctrine http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/26 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/26 Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:16:11 PDT Christopher W. Schmidt Civil Rights Listening to History? Parents Involved, Brown, and the Colorblind Constitution http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/25 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/25 Fri, 09 Oct 2009 08:58:44 PDT Christopher W. Schmidt Legal History The Sit-Ins and the State Action Doctrine http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/24 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/24 Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:50:07 PDT By taking their seats at “whites only” lunch counters across the South in the spring of 1960, African American students not only launched a dramatic new stage in the civil rights movement, they also sparked a national reconsideration of the scope of the constitutional equal protection requirement. The critical constitutional question raised by the sit-in movement was whether the Fourteenth Amendment, which after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) prohibited racial segregation in schools and other state-operated facilities, applied to privately owned accommodations open to the general public. From the perspective of the student protesters, the lunch counter operators, and most of the American public, the question of whether the nondiscriminatory logic of Brown should apply to public accommodations involved a consideration of the role of public accommodations in social life, the dignitary costs of exclusion, and the values served by the protection of private choice and associational rights within the commercial sphere. From the perspective of lawyers, judges, and lawmakers, the relevant question centered on a doctrinal issue that had been under considerable pressure in the two decades preceding the sit-ins: the “state action” requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time of the sit-ins, many assumed that resolution of the issue demanded a reconsideration of the state action doctrine. Yet, when given the opportunity, neither the Supreme Court, in a series of cases arising from the sit-in protests, nor Congress, in framing the public accommodations provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, took this path. As a matter of official constitutional interpretation, the state action doctrine survived the civil rights movement, modified somewhat but retaining the same basic form it had when the Court first defined it in the late nineteenth century. In this Article, I explain why the sit-in movement, which proved remarkably successful at changing attitudes, practices, and statutes, ultimately failed to change constitutional law. My analysis of the resilience of the state action doctrine draws on recent scholarship on extrajudicial constitutionalism, even as it challenges some of the premises that underlie this scholarship.

]]> Christopher W. Schmidt Civil Rights Constitutional Law Legal History Creating Brown v. Board of Education: Ideology and Constitutional Change, 1945-1955 (Nov. 2004) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University). http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/23 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/23 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:16:46 PST Christopher W. Schmidt The Civil Rights Movement http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/22 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/22 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:15:27 PST Christopher W. Schmidt Brown v. Board of Education http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/21 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/21 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:13:54 PST Christopher W. Schmidt The Great Black Migration http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/20 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/20 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:12:47 PST Christopher W. Schmidt The New Deal http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/19 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/19 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:10:50 PST Christopher W. Schmidt J. Waties Waring and the Making of Liberal Jurisprudence in Postwar America http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/18 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/18 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:08:29 PST Christopher W. Schmidt The Children of Brown: Psychology and School Segregation in Mid-Century America, http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/17 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/17 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:07:00 PST Christopher W. Schmidt Frank Robinson http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/16 http://works.bepress.com/christopher_schmidt/16 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:05:06 PST Christopher W. Schmidt