Schwartz on the Committee of Style and the Preamble

David S. Schwartz, University of Wisconsin Law School, has posted two papers.  The first, The Committee of Style and the Federalist Constitution, is forthcoming in volume 70 of the Buffalo Law Review:

The conventional interpretation of the Constitution assumes that the Committee of Style, which created the final draft of the Constitution, lacked authority to engage with substance; therefore, any arguably substantive changes it did make should be disregarded in favor of earlier draft language found in the Constitutional Convention records. This "Style doctrine" has been embraced by the Supreme Court and several leading constitutional scholars. This article argues that the Style doctrine is historically unfounded and obscures the Constitution's original meaning. The Committee of Style was not prohibited from proposing substantive changes. In any case, most of the revisions proposed by the Committee of Style clarified or reinforced Federalist positions rather than proposing substantive changes. Ultimately, the Style doctrine is an artifact of post-ratification developments tending to disregard elements of the more nationalistic constitutional vision of the Federalist Framers.

The second, Reconsidering the Constitution's Preamble: the Words that Made Us U.S., is forthcoming in volume 37 of Constitutional Commentary:

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution is wrongly dismissed by conventional doctrine as a purely symbolic or stylistic flourish with no operative legal significance. But the drafting history of the Preamble, observable by comparing the preambles in the Articles of Confederation, the Committee of Detail draft of the Constitution, and the Committee of Style's final version, demonstrate that the Framers considered the Preamble to be substantively meaningful. Just what the Preamble means remains ambiguous: it might be viewed as a rejection of compact theory, as an interpretive guide to the powers granted in the body of the Constitution, or as a source of implied powers. But the view that reduces the Preamble to a legally inoperative flourish has no basis as a matter of text or history.

--Dan Ernst