Fugitives and Agrarians in a World Without Frontiers

Rien de grand avant l'tat. Let the French have their Colbertisme; Americans hold steadfast their faith in constitutionalism, the unofficial civic religion of the United States. Implicit in originalism, the most rigidly orthodox variant of America's constitutional faith is the belief that the legal world began with the framing of the Constitution. "All things created before me were not eternal": with the Constitution as creation, the American legal imagination need not embrace anything that occurred before 1787.