W.D.Moore – APSA-03– Slaughter-House – p.51
today: the majority and dissenters alike signaled a broader-based retreated from the Republican
party’s embrace of radical commitments that had animated many of the debates over the fourteenth
amendment’s proposal and ratification. Thus much of the fourteenth amendment’s radically
transformative character would remain unrealized at least until the middle of the twentieth century.
Accordingly, we may conclude that the justices’ opinions in Slaughter-House, as with the
fourteenth amendment that they (re)constructed in that case, had partial rather than complete
authority across the six criteria examined in this essay, both separately and as aspects of a more
inclusive criterion rooted in principles of popular sovereignty. Instead of authoritatively settling
the meaning of that amendment, the justices contributed to a process of (re)constructing text with
pluralistic rather than unitary authoritative meaning. This process, involving representation of the
constitutional identities and commitments of “the people of the United States,” variously
conceived, has continued to unfold since this case both within courtrooms and outside them.
Convention