Wieboldt on "Shall We Settle for Anything Less Than Complete Equality?" Catholic Power and the First National Fight for Parental Rights in Education, 1947-1962

Dennis J. Wieboldt, III, University of Notre Dame, is publishing "Shall We Settle for Anything Less Than Complete Equality?" Catholic Power and the First National Fight for Parental Rights in Education, 1947-1962 at 34 Rel. & Am. Cul.-- (2026). Here is the abstract.

After the Supreme Court incorporated the Establishment Clause against the states in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), raucous national debates broke out between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews about the constitutionality of government aid to parochial schools. This article offers the first account of how these interconfessional hostilities shaped the Catholic Church's parochial school litigation strategy after Everson. To undercut claims that government aid to parochial schools would perniciously enrich the (Roman) Catholic hierarchy, the Church's public spokesmen increasingly framed debates about parochial school aid after Everson as implicating the constitutional rights of American parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children. In so doing, these figures eschewed arguments made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the government has an obligation to fund institutional religion. Moreover, to prevent anti-Catholic prejudice from impacting the disposition of discrete church-state disputes, lawyers associated with the Catholic bishops' official episcopal organization sometimes refrained from publicly involving themselves in local litigation, all while privately supplying litigants with strategic counsel. In concluding, this article suggests that the Church's post-Everson approach to defending the constitutionality of parochial school aid was motivated by a consistent conviction that parents who sent their children to Catholic schools ought to be treated in the same manner as parents who sent their children to other nonpublic (but non-Catholic) schools. When the scope of government aid to nonpublic schools grew in later years, this argument could therefore be invoked to support parochial schools' equal inclusion in more robust aid programs.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Mittal, Rakove, and Weingast on The Constitutional Choices of 1787 and Their Consquences

Sonia Mittal, Yale University Law School, Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University, and Barry R. Weingast, Stanford University Department of Political Science, have published The Constitutional Choices of 1787 and their Consequences in Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s, edited by Irwin Douglass and Richard Sylla, National Bureau of Economic Research (2011)

The choices made in the creation of a constitution have immediate political results and, often enough, lasting economic consequences. That, at least, is the overall thesis of this book, which examines the economic significance of the Federal Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in the late spring and summer of 1787. The Constitution occupies so large a place in our collective understanding of American history and politics, is so vital a symbol of national identity, that it is difficult to recall that the American federal republic might easily have evolved along alternative paths. Of course, it is well known that some matters were hotly contested in 1787, such as the disputes over representation that preoccupied the Convention for the first seven weeks of debate, and that others, notably the absence of a declaration of fundamental rights, became objects of public controversy as soon as the Constitution was submitted to a sovereign people for ratification. But to emphasize the big dramatic issues – the purported “great compromise” over representation, the assuaging of Anti-Federalist doubts with the proposal of a “bill of rights” – is still only to confirm what a heroic episode it all was. The other contingent choices that set the Convention on its course, or that gave the Constitution its essential character, remain obscure.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.