An article from last October's "Keeping Faith with the Constitution in Changing Times" symposium, co-sponsored by Constitutional Interpretation and Change Issue Group and Vanderbilt University Law School. The symposium was held at Vanderbilt University Law School in October 2006.

In Constitutional Interpretation as Structured Choice, Peggy Cooper Davis, John S. R. Shad Professor of Lawyering and Ethics, New York University Law School, explores the history of the Reconstruction Amendments and the element of choice in legal decision-making. Professor Davis explains, “The liberty promised by the Fourteenth Amendment and extended to all by the interaction of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was understood as slavery’s opposite. Enslavement turned on denying natal ties; to be a slave was to be the property of a master rather than the child of a family. Freedom required that the right of family be restored to slaves and guaranteed to all. Enslavement turned on denying rights of self-determination and self-definition; human property lost its value if it could not be controlled. Freedom required that a measure of personal autonomy be restored to slaves and guaranteed to all. Enslavement turned finally on the denial of political status; slavery was, in Orlando Patterson’s terminology, civil death. Freedom required that political voice be restored to slaves and guaranteed to all. . . . We have, and ought to acknowledge, a choice about how we will apply the lessons of Reconstruction history."