| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 290 words from this article are provided below; about 682 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman. The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 272. $40.00.
This provocative book by Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman examines an underexplored chapter of American constitutional development: the tensions created by the accommodation of American territorial expansion within the constitutional system. The authors' goals are to restore territorial law to its central role in American constitutional studies, and to explore what it would mean to take the Constitution seriously in this area by testing the legality of America's solutions to territorial acquisition and governance over the past 200 years. Although other works have explored aspects of the constitutional implications of American imperial expansion, the work differs from them in its comprehensive sweep in addressing the various permutations of territorial acquisition and governance, and in applying an exclusively originalist perspective to questions of constitutional legitimacy.	1
The book proceeds by setting forth the authors' sense of original understanding and its implications for the power to acquire territory, and then analyzes the legality of events in America's nineteenth-century territorial expansion and governance. Lawson and Seidman are purported originalists, with a self-avowed fascination with form over function in constitutional analysis. In the first of several controversial moves, the authors define original understanding, not in the traditional sense of relying on the historical record of what the Constitution's drafters and ratifiers actually said and understood, but as what a "fully informed" eighteenth-century public would have understood the Constitution to mean. They thus rely on a peculiar "rational reconstruction" of what a necessarily mythic figure (somewhat akin to Ronald Dworkin's Judge Hercules) would have believed in the eighteenth century.	. . .

There are about 682 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.