Conservative Originalists Confront the Progressive Era: A Developmental Account

In his seminal 1982 Harvard Law Review Term Forward, “Nomos and Narrative,” Robert Cover reflected on the centrality of narrative to the forging of legal and constitutional meaning.  Using Cover’s theory as an analytical point of entry, this paper will consider contestation within movement conservatism in the United States from the immediate postwar years to the present over the outlines of a story of the trajectory of American constitutional development.   Within the movement’s confines, intense debates were undertaken over the location and interpretation of critical turning points in American constitutional history, of that history’s heroes and villains, and of the architecture of the American constitutional system.  These debates included intense contention over the meaning of the Civil War, Reconstruction, The Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Nineteen Sixties.   Contestation over grand historical narratives, I will argue, played a critical role in helping constitute movement and Republican Party politics, legal interpretive theory, and the path of Supreme Court constitutional doctrine.