From "Dust Mites" to the Digital Age: Making Constitutional Historical Sources Available to the Legal Community

For those that are interested in the history of the Constitution and issues of original meaning, a Supreme Court case worth following is NLRB v. Canning. The case was brought by a Washington state company that appealed a decision of a panel the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Two of the three members of the NLRB panel at the time of the decision were appointed by President Obama during a Senate recess in 2012. The company has argued that the NLRB decision is invalid because the recess appointments were unconstitutional. Attorneys on both sides of the issue have focused on the historical meaning of the recess appointments clause in Article II, Section 2, which gives the president "power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate."

A recent article in the National Law Journal focused on the efforts of the attorneys on both sides of the case to obtain historical documents to assist them in determining what was originally intended by the recess appointments clause. Text from the article is also available here from the Constitutional Accountability Center. Specifically, the attorneys utilized the help of a digital library project called ConSource (The Constitutional Sources Project), which has been digitizing many of the historical documents that are relevant to the Canning case, such as letters written by Attorney General Edmund Randolph in the 1790s which discuss the recess power. Making the documents accessible digitally allows for greater access outside the "dusty" corners of archives and also makes the documents searchable. Click here for more information about ConSource.

For further reading on Constitutional history and issues of original meaning, consider some of the Law Library's titles, including:

Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question / By Harry V. Jaffa with Bruce Ledewitz, Robert L. Stone, and George Anastaplo

Original Intent and the Constitution: A Philosophical Study / By Gregory Bassham

Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution / By Leonard W. Levy