Alison LaCroix on Varieties of American Sovereignty

In this episode I talk with Alison LaCroix, an intellectual historian and Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She writes and teaches widely, but in this episode we focus on a long running theme in her work: the history of different conceptions of federalism in American law.

Professor LaCroix’s first book, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism was about the debates around federalism in the founding era and early decades of the republic. Her most recent book, The Interbellum Constitution, is an even larger project, seeking to synthesize the largest constitutional debates and conflicts from roughly the War of 1812 through the Civil War. The book has a wide enough scope to cover both the familiar and unfamiliar legal stories of the era, but it would be worth reading even just for its wonderfully original coverage of two of the most dramatic moments in constitutional history, the nullification crisis and the Cherokee nation’s fight to block its removal from Georgia. We talk about all of this and more.