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Daniel Webster and the Unfinished Constitution (Hardcover)
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Daniel Webster and the Unfinished Constitution (Hardcover)
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Daniel Webster and the Unfinished Constitution reveals Webster as
the foremost constitutional lawyer of his day. Peter Charles Hoffer
builds a persuasive case that Webster was more than a skilled
practitioner who rose rapidly from his hardscrabble New Hampshire
origins. Hoffer thoroughly documents the ways in which Webster was
an innovative jurist. While Chief Justice John Marshall gets credit
for much of our early constitutional jurisprudence, in fact in a
series of key cases Marshall simply borrowed Webster's oral and
written arguments. For Webster, Marshall, and many lawyers and
jurists of their day, professions of adherence to the Constitution
were universal. Yet they knew that the Constitution could not be
fixed in time; its text needed to be read in light of the rapidly
transforming early republic and antebellum eras or it would become
irrelevant. As Chief Justice Marshall explained in Bank of the
United States v. Deveaux (1809): 'A constitution, from its nature,
deals in generals, not in detail. Its framers cannot perceive
minute distinctions which arise in the progress of the nation, and
therefore confine it to the establishment of broad and general
principles.' But were these 'broad and general principles'
themselves fixed? For Webster there were landmarks: the Contract
Clause and the Commerce Clause. While others were exploring and
surveying the Northwest Territory and the Louisiana Purchase,
Webster set out to map the spaces in the constitutional and legal
landscape that were unmarked. Peter Charles Hoffer provides an
insightful and timely study of how Webster's analysis of three key
constitutional issues is relevant to today's constitutional
conflicts: the relationship between law and politics, between
public policy and private rights, and between the federal
government and the states, all of which remain contentious in our
constitutional jurisprudence and crucial to our constitutional
order.
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