Gowder on Never Send to Know on Whom the Boot Stomps: It Stomps on Thee

Paul A. Gowder, Northwestern University School of Law, is publishing Never Send to Know on Whom the Boot Stomps; it Stomps on Thee in the Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This Essay was originally prepared as a lecture for the 2026 Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review Symposium, "The Ever-Evolving Definition of America’s History and Tradition." It diagnoses the current tyrannical moment in American constitutional practice and the way that the subaltern, and particularly Black American, historical experience with tyranny can be put into service in resisting it. It suggests the Black anti-tyrannical tradition draws on a kind of postmodern and agonistic conception of civic identity according to which the American polity is in part constituted by contested claims to inclusion. And it draws on the drama surrounding the current government's bad-faith efforts to undermine the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of universal birthright citizenship to show how the contemporary tyrannical movement depends on the civic-exclusionary traditions of our tyrannical past, and how drawing on the Black anti-tyranny tradition suggests that the Overton window might be shifted in the opposite direction: universal birthright can be a floor, not a ceiling, for constitutional claims to citizenship.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.