Roosevelt on A Tale of Two Americas @kroosevelt93 @PennJCL @pennlaw @RebeiroBradley

Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School, has published A Tale of Two Americas at 25 Journal of Constitutional Law 939 (2023). Here is the abstract.

This article responds to Brad Rebeiro’s review of The Nation That Never Was. Professor Rebeiro offers a reading of the Declaration of Independence as focused on equality. I agree that this is what the Declaration means to us now, but I claim that is not what it meant in 1776. A close reading of the Declaration reveals that it is focused, as the title suggests, on independence, and its assertions about equality are deployed to defend that argument against the divine right of kings. Because the Declaration’s equality exists in the state of nature and is part of an argument about the origins of legitimate political authority, it is not relevant to the state of society and has no implications for the institution of slavery, which is not an exercise of legitimate political authority.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.