Who Decides?

The earlier book, 51 Imperfect Solutions, told stories about specific state and federal individual constitutional rights, and explained two benefits of American federalism: how two sources of constitutional protection for liberty and property rights could be valuable to individual freedom and how the state courts could be useful laboratories of innovation when it comes to the development of national constitutional rights. This book tells the other half of the story. Instead of focusing on state constitutional individual rights, it focuses on state constitutional structure. Everything in law and politics, including individual rights, eventually comes back to divisions of power and the evergreen question: Who decides? The goal of this book is to tell the structure side of the story and to identify the shifting balances of power revealed when one accounts for American constitutional law as opposed to just federal constitutional law. Who Decides? contains three main parts—one each on the judicial, executive, and legislative branches—as well as stand-alone chapters on home-rule issues raised by local governments and the benefits and burdens raised by the ease of amending state constitutions. A theme in the book is the increasingly stark divide between the ever-more-democratic nature of state governments and the ever-less-democratic nature of the federal government over time.

Local Governments

The US Constitution never mentions “city,” “county,” or “township,” not even “local” or “municipal” governments. It concerns itself only with sovereign entities. Because local governments “cannot claim to be sovereigns” and because whatever power a local government has tends to flow from its state, that sounds like the end of the matter. But local governments still exercise sovereign powers, including law enforcement, eminent domain, education, taxing, zoning, and other indispensable “attributes of sovereignty.” Even if the US Constitution does not mention cities by name and even if cities cannot claim sovereign status, the federal charter still has ample consequences for municipal governments. This chapter takes vertical separation of powers one step further, to federalism within federalism. It explains the division of powers between state and local governments and chronicles disputes that have arisen between them. If, in modern America, like-minded people increasingly gravitate to similar states, the same is true within states, whether in cities, suburbs, or rural areas. Home rule and other local allocations of power sometimes allow people in these communities to express their distinct political preferences and live under them, too.

Revivals

This chapter explores the revival in 1859 of religious enthusiasm in the north-east counties of Ireland. The effect of the 1859 revival was that the communities of Irish protestants became both more denominationally diverse and more politically united. Protestants who have not been brought together by the economic compulsion of the penal laws were instead combined by the powerful effects of evangelical faith and by fears about the possibility of home rule. In the same period, Catholic religion was similarly transformed. While never promoting the emotionalism that characterized the revivalist piety of the evangelicals, the Catholic ‘devotional revolution’ drew upon several generations of changes in popular belief and behaviour to promote, in the aftermath of the potato famine, catechism, regular confession, and weekly mass attendance. The power of these religious communities became increasingly important at home. In the early nineteenth century, the complexities of the ancien régime were radically simplified, as the multiple identities of the eighteenth century gave way to the differentiation of Catholics and nationalists versus Protestants and unionists.

Temperance and Self-Determination in the British Isles

Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) examines the British Empire, with Chapter 5 focusing on liquor and imperialism within the British Isles, where temperance movement first took hold in the periphery of Scotland and Ireland. The chapter explores the colonizer’s alcohol narrative in Ireland, used to justify the domination of Britain’s “first colony.” In the 1840s, Fr. Theobald Mathew’s wildly popular Irish temperance movement quickly fused with the cause of Irish nationalism, thanks to Daniel O’Connell. With the advent of “Maine Law” prohibitionism, everyone from John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx contributed to debates over alcohol control and prohibition. Intertwined with Irish Home Rule, British prohibitionism crested in 1895 and then gave way to Gothenburg alcohol control and pub reform, especially with World War I. Similar imperial dynamics of alco-colonization are noted in Britain’s other white settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Labour History in Ireland’s ‘Decade of Centenaries’

In 2012 the governments in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland launched their Decade of Centenaries projects to ‘focus’ on ‘significant centenaries’ occurring between 2012 and 2022-3, with an unusual degree of co-ordination between them. The initiatives have generated major public interest in the commemoration of events like the third Home Rule crisis, the 1913 Lockout, the 1916 rising, the First World War, the War of Independence, extension of the franchise to women, and partition, and also in the meaning and relevance of historiography. This paper examines the thinking behind the Decade of Centenaries, the state of the Irish Labour History Society and Irish labour historiography, the involvement of state authorities with labour anniversaries, and the consequences for publications on labour and on the public understanding of labour historiography. While the Decade of Centenaries is patently an attempt to manage the remembrance of the controversies and violence that led to the creation of the two Irish states between 1920 and 1922, it has been beneficial for historians by encouraging popular engagement with the past. Traditionally, Irish labour historiography has been weak in its presence in the academy, but strong in its organic connections with the trade union movement. The Decade of Centenaries has allowed it to exploit its strength to secure greater state and public recognition. Among the positive outcomes have been a significant increase in the number of labour historians and publications on labour, and an extension of the ambit of labour history into new fields of enquiry.

Review of Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Home Rule Crisis, 1909-14, by James Doherty

Review of Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Home Rule Crisis, 1909-14, by James Doherty (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019) ISBN: 9781782053606,320pp. €39.00 (hardback).

James Bryce and Parliamentary Sovereignty

This article considers the important but neglected contribution of James Bryce (1838–1922)—noted historian, Gladstonian statesman, and ambassador to the US—to the constitutional debates over Home Rule for Ireland in late Victorian Britain. It focuses on Bryce's reflections on the nature of sovereignty and constitutional government provoked by the need to reconcile Home Rule with parliamentary sovereignty, recently canonized by Bryce's Unionist counterpart and friend, A. V. Dicey. Challenging a tradition of scholarship that sees the Home Rule debates as “a sideshow” and Bryce's contribution as “illogical,” I suggest that Bryce's contribution in fact represents an innovative imperial constitutionalism of what may be called “soft” federalism, which rests not on a codified constitution enforced by courts but on a paradoxical understanding of Parliament's de facto sovereignty as constrained by moral commitments. In this light, the jurisprudential debates appear less a sideshow than an important part of the political contest itself.