Constitutional amendments, like all laws, may lead to unanticipated and even undesired outcomes. In this collection of original essays, a team of distinguished historians, political scientists, and legal scholars led by award-winning constitutional historian David E. Kyvig examines significant instances in which reform produced something other than the foreseen result. An opening essay examines the intentions of the Constitution's framers in creating an amending mechanism and then explores unexpected uses of that instrument. Thereafter, authors focus on the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments, addressing such subjects as criminal justice procedures, the presidential election system, the Civil War's impact on race and gender relations, the experiment in national prohibition, women's suffrage, and, finally, limits on the presidency. Together these contributions illuminate aspects of constitutional stability and evolution, challenging current thinking about reform within the formal system of change provided by Article V of the Constitution. Forcefully demonstrating that constitutional law is not immune to unanticipated consequences, the eight scholars underscore the need for care, responsibility, and historical awareness in altering the nation's fundamental law.

In 1868 a scion of one of the leading families of Richmond, Virginia, ambushed and killed the city's most controversial journalist over an article that had dishonored the killer's family. In 1892 a Democratic politician killed a crusading Danville minister after a dispute at the polls. In 1907 a former judge shot to death the son of the Nelson County sheriff for an alleged rape, and in 1935 an Appalachian schoolteacher stood accused of killing her father by beating him with a shoe. All of these killers stood trial; two were convicted and two were acquitted. These cases attracted extensive press coverage, and journalists became not only recorders of the stories but integral parts of them, constructing the meaning of the events as they occurred and blurring the lines between reporter and reported.

Journalists from outside the state in their coverage of these cases provoked Virginians, and especially the press, to explain the interaction of their social values and legal system. In Murder, Honor, and Law, Richard F. Hamm explores the contrasts between how and to what effect national, particularly northern, newspapers perceived and portrayed Virginia law and custom versus how local papers covered the same events. In each of the cases Hamm shows the interplay of national media and culture with southern law, values, and culture and highlights how newspapers accepted, produced, altered, and disseminated ideas of southern exceptionalism, especially ideas about honor and chivalry. By focusing on the evolving press coverage of a number of crimes and trials over seventy years, Hamm illuminates the shift in southerners' defenses against northern criticism from a position of pride in a society in which honor could trump law to claims that the South was just as law-abiding as the rest of the nation. He thus illustrates some key aspects for transformations of southern exceptionalism.

The American South Series

Richard Hamm examines prohibitionists' struggle for reform from the late nineteenth century to their great victory in securing passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Because the prohibition movement was a quintessential reform effort, Hamm uses it as a case study to advance a general theory about the interaction between reformers and the state during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most scholarship on prohibition focuses on its social context, but Hamm explores how the regulation of commerce and the federal tax structure molded the drys' crusade. Federalism gave the drys a restricted setting--individual states--as a proving ground for their proposals. But federal policies precipitated a series of crises in the states that the drys strove to overcome. According to Hamm, interaction with the federal government system helped to reshape prohibitionists' legal culture--that is, their ideas about what law was and how it could be used.
Originally published in 1995.
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