A History of Violence

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Abstract This chapter discusses the violence of constitutional law, as verified by American constitutional history. It seeks to illuminate the centrality of violence to American constitutional history, and in so doing, illuminate the shape and trajectory, the limits and possibilities, of American constitutional law in the present. Although nothing could be easier than to find epic examples of injustice in American constitutional history, the object is not to call out injustice as such but to illustrate the violence—justified or not—at the root of and in the continuing history of American constitutional law. Using the history of ongoing controversies in the American constitutional law of crime, the chapter makes the case for the ongoing violence of constitutional law.