The paper analyzes Anti-Federalist and Federalist views of the office of the presidency during the ratification debate over the Constitution in 1787-1788. It explores in detailed fashion the critiques ...

In this episode of “The Opinions,” David French breaks down why parts of the original Constitution lend themselves to abuse — and which three amendments could stop another shutdown like this one. “But ...

In this episode of Constitutionally Speaking, Jay and Luke finish their discussion of the Anti-Federalists by asking: What did they get right? The Bill of Rights is a great achievement, a kind of ...

Federalists carried the day at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention in October 1787, but Antifederal arguments were spreading rapidly. Newspapers all across the country were publishing works by ...

Among the many yellowing paperbacks on my shelves is a copy of The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates. It's a sort of greatest hits collection of contemporaneous ...

In the war of words over whether or not to ratify the US Constitution, the two opposing sides — the Federalists, who supported ratification, and the Anti-Federalists, who did not — always used pen ...

James Madison, the architect of the U.S. Constitution, played a major role in its ratification process. He articulated his ideas in The Federalist Papers, in which he tried to address the concerns of ...

In this episode of Constitutionally Speaking, Jay and Luke discuss the Anti-Federalists, the politicians and polemicists who opposed the Constitution during the ratification debate of 1787-1788. The ...

Since its adoption, the US Constitution has structured Americans’ political discourse. So, it is striking, and probably dangerous, when an incipient ideological consensus channels those who opposed ...

One of the pleasures of writing is you often surprise yourself. Poets and fiction writers try to get out of the way to allow the work to go where it wants to go; nonfiction writers, like journalists, ...