Early Americans did not separate individual rights from federalism limits on power.
Evidence
There does not seem to have been any distinction between those laws that offended individual rights (like the Alien and Sedition Acts) and those that offended federalism-a modem distinction that makes most sense when the scope of rights is not held to be identical with the limits on the grant of power. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 214
Categorization
- XREF: Challenges the modern rights/federalism dichotomy central to current constitutional scholarship. — connects to: American states’-rights parties invoked individual freedom while defending intermediate circles. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 633
- SEED: Could seed an essay on how the rights-federalism split is an anachronistic imposition on Founding-era thinking.