『History and the Supreme Court』のカバーアート

History and the Supreme Court

History and the Supreme Court

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概要

 I do not usually stop what I am doing to listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. That is lawyer country. Necessary work, important work, but not usually where historians spend their time. But this week, something in one of those arguments stopped me cold. Not because of the outcome, which we do not yet know. Not because of the modern policy question involved. But because of how history was used. Or more precisely, how it was handled. During arguments over a Hawaii firearms law, attorneys defending the statute reached back into the Reconstruction era and cited the post Civil War Black Codes as historical precedent. Laws written in 1865 and 1866 to control, restrict, and terrorize newly freed Black Americans. Laws so abusive that they triggered the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment itself. Those laws were presented, in the Supreme Court of the United States, as examples of acceptable historical regulation. If you are not a historian of Reconstruction, that might sound odd. If you are, it should feel deeply unsettling. This episode is not about whether Hawaii’s law is right or wrong. It is not about modern politics. It is about how history works, what it is for, and what happens when we treat the past as a collection of citations instead of a story with meaning. Because some laws are precedents. And some laws are warnings.
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