The name of the United States serves well to remind us of the true relation between constitutional historians and legal constitutionalists. They are each concerned with the constitution, but from a different aspect. An historian is primarily occupied with ascertaining the steps by which a constitution has grown to be what it is. To a lawyer, on the other hand, the primary object of study is the law as it now stands; he is only secondarily occupied with ascertaining how it came into existence. This is absolutely clear if we compare the position of an American historian with the position of an American jurist. The historian of the American Union would not commence his researches at the year 1789; he would have a good deal to say about Colonial history and about the institutions of England. A lawyer lecturing on the Constitution of the United States would, on the other hand, necessarily start from the Constitution itself. But he would soon see that the Articles of the Constitution required a knowledge of the Articles of Confederation, that the opinions of Washington, of Hamilton and generally of the "Fathers," as one sometimes hears them called in America, threw light on the meaning of various constitutional articles, and further, that the meaning of the Constitution could not be adequately understood by anyone who did not take into account the situation of the Colonies before the separation from England and the rules of common law, as well as the general conceptions of law and justice inherited by English colonists from their English forefathers. -Lectures on the Law of the (English) Constitution, Albert Venn Dicey (1885). |