We seek to explain how states govern big cities. Political scientists' accounts of urban politics either fail to treat the state systematically or place state hostility at the center of such an account. Accounts by historians, by contrast, offer tools political scientists can use to theorize urban politics in the state arena. We use those tools, and we find that cities can manage the legislative process. This power starts with bill introduction and carries through to the vote on the floor. This ability results from a central feature of American state politics: on bills about big cities, state legislators now and in the past find their primary voting cues in the unity of local delegations. The city delegation, then, has tremendous power to manage the state's involvement in city affairs. In many respects, ours is an account of a special kind of divided government, with two institutional arenas where urban government is carried out.

The making of the Reed Rules – the source of today's U.S. House procedure – has often been studied, yet no one has previously noticed the extent to which they originated in a today forgotten Republican plan to federally regulate Southern House elections. This article shows how and why the Reed Rules and federal election regulation became fused in the 51st Congress. Republican members of the House not only had preferences over the internal governance of the House; they also simultaneously had preferences over the structure of the party system. In following this article's analysis of the linkage between the Reed Rules and the strategy of party conflict in the Gilded Age one comes to better appreciate the role of party building as a source of congressional development.

Labor, gender and, class have each been identified as important reconstructive forces of the American constitutional order, but rarely has a single organization provided an opportunity to directly study the interrelationship of all these forces during a critical period of constitutional change. This article examines one such organization during the years leading up to the New Deal: The Women's Trade Union League. The WTUL, which uniquely mixed middle-class and working-class membership, was founded in 1903 to facilitate trade union organizing by women. Its labor approach, however, would ultimately fail, pushing the league to more fully embrace its connections to the middle-class leadership of the women's movement, thereby transforming its strategic approach and constitutional outlook away from the anti-statist voluntarism of the labor movement to the pragmatic and statist maternalism of the women's movement. The WTUL would subsequently become an important contributor to the legislative program of progressive reformers flourishing during this period under the gendered exception to free contract liberty won in Muller v. Oregon in 1908. This strategic organizational transformation would create tensions within the league and between the league and women workers, as well as invite constitutional consequences for women workers that would resonate for years, long past the constitutional revolution of 1937 and the apparent constitutional reintegration of male and female labor. This case study, therefore, provides a unique lens through which to view not only the constitutional tradeoffs of the adoption of the gendered Constitution as an alternative to the labor Constitution, but also the impact of the resource-conscious decision making of social-movement actors that is often overlooked by constitutional scholars preoccupied with judicial decision making.

In lobbying for the job discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, liberal civil rights advocates wanted an administrative job discrimination enforcement regime modeled on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), with no private lawsuits. Pivotal conservative Republicans, empowered by a divided Democratic Party and the filibuster in the Senate, defeated an administrative framework and provided instead for private lawsuits with incentives for enforcement, including attorney's fees for winning plaintiffs. They were motivated by native suspicion toward bureaucratic regulation of business in general, as well as fear that they would not be able to control an NLRB-style civil rights agency in the hands of their ideological adversaries. In the political environment of 1963–64, some meaningful enforcement provisions were necessary, and to conservative Republicans private litigation was preferable to public bureaucracy.

This choice had important self-reinforcing policy feedback effects. Civil rights advocates were initially optimistic about agency implementation and skeptical about the efficacy of private litigation to enforce Title VII, even with attorney's fees for winning plaintiffs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, civil rights advocates observed an agency lacking the material resources and political will and commitment to carry out its mission. At the same time, they observed levels of private enforcement that far exceeded their expectations, as well as courts inclined toward broadly proplaintiff interpretations of Title VII. The CRA of 1964's attorney's fees provisions also had the effect of contributing funds to civil rights groups that prosecuted lawsuits and of conjuring into being a private, for-profit bar to litigate civil rights claims in general, and job discrimination claims in particular. These developments drove a transformation in the enforcement preferences of civil rights groups toward private litigation, weakening their historic support for administrative implementation. Working together with the burgeoning for-profit civil rights bar, they mobilized to expand the fee-shifting provisions of the CRA of 1964 across the entire field of civil rights, which they accomplished by successfully lobbying for enactment of the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act of 1976. Thus was created the modern civil rights enforcement framework.

Previous work in law and political development has emphasized the role that a “support structure” in civil society plays in translating electoral success into legal outcomes. In this paper, I claim that legal change can also work in the other direction—political appointees in government can use their power to assist their allies in civil society. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival materials, I show how—especially under Attorney General Meese—the Reagan Department of Justice invested in the ideas (through its support of originalism), organizations (especially the Federalist Society), and personnel of the conservative legal movement and reorganized itself to give these longer-term objectives more importance in the department. These investments add up to a case of “transformative bureaucracy”: the use of bureaucratic power to transform the conditions of future political conflict.

From the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the New Deal, American legislators commonly endowed administrative agencies with broad discretionary power. They did so over the objections of an intellectual founder of the American administrative state. The American-born, German-educated lawyer and political scientist Ernst Freund developed an Americanized version of the Rechtsstaat—a government bound by fixed and definite rules—in an impressive body of scholarship between 1894 and 1915. In 1920 he eagerly took up an offer from the Commonwealth Fund to finance a comprehensive study of administration in the United States. Here was his chance to show that a Continental version of the Rule of Law had come to America. Unfortunately for Freund, the Commonwealth Fund yoked him to the Austrian-born, American-educated Felix Frankfurter, a celebrant of the enlightened discretion of administrators. Freund's major publication for the Commonwealth Fund, Administrative Powers over Persons and Property (1928), made little impression on scholars of administrative law, who took their lead from Frankfurter. Today the Rechtsstaat is largely the beau ideal of libertarian critics of the New Deal; few recognize that it is also part of the diverse legacy of Progressive reform.

This article examines the American labor movement's struggles since the nineteenth century over how to respond to mass immigration. Labor's struggles have turned on whether it views new waves fundamentally as a threat, which elicits a strategy of restriction, or an opportunity, which elicits a strategy of solidarity. It also captures the advantages of a longue-duree approach for understanding the fraught and evolving relationship between American unionism and immigration. Rather than a Briggsian story of labor traditionally embracing a restrictionist position, our archival and interview research from the Reconstruction Era to present shows that labor's position on immigration has been in regular contention—with disagreements getting resolved in a restrictionist direction during certain periods and an expansionist one during others. Likewise, the familiar scholarly claim that an unprecedented “turnabout” in labor's response to immigration can be pinpointed to 1999 ignores more than a century of internal debate and variegated external activism on this issue. We lay out an analytical model for understanding why the labor movement has viewed new immigrant workers as a threat in certain contexts and an opportunity for growth in others. The model highlights how three external variables—the fluid structure of the labor market, immigration trends, and the state's disposition toward organized labor—establish either a secure or insecure environment within which unions respond to immigration. It also underscores the importance of how dominant modes of unionism within the movement interact with these external forces to shape its perception of “new” immigrants in restrictive or solidaristic terms. Significantly, the sequence and recombination of these forces during the past century or more have transformed how organized labor responds to new immigrant workers in an insecure environment today. Our research presents a diverse movement honestly wrestling with immigration's profound conundrums, including elemental issues of who it identifies as part of its fold (workers deserving of fraternity and sorority) and who it deems as permanent outsiders (workers who were a menace to the cause).

Traditional accounts of presidential hostility toward judicial authority rely on the federal judiciary's structure for explanatory leverage, focusing particularly on the court's potential to reach countermajoritarian rulings. By evaluating executive-judicial relations during the early republic, that is, the years prior to the Civil War, I suggest that anti-court sentiment stemmed not only from antipathy toward unelected judges or the seemingly undemocratic possibilities of judicial review, but also from a civic republican apprehension toward opposition. I show, first, that Jefferson, Jackson, and Van Buren considered open and stable opposition to be a harbinger of civil unrest and strove to preserve unity among the federal branches, and second, that this fear and corresponding aspiration toward unity underlay these presidents' concerns about judicial authority. As such, I argue that the presumption of the judiciary's countermajoritarian difficulty could be understood as a political development rather than a structural anomaly of the Constitution. In making this claim, I highlight the power of entrepreneurial presidents to drive conceptual change. Furthermore, focusing on the politics of opposition as a key element in the development of presidential-judicial relations broadens how we think of civic republicanism as an organizing political principle, defining not only early American political culture and electoral politics, but also influencing matters of governance.