Things to Read This Week (7/6/26)

Of course there’s been some interesting Declaration-related scholarship posted lately.

Here’s Jonathan Green, What The Declaration Didn’t Do: “Whether the Declaration actually created thirteen "Free and Independent States" on July 4, 1776, turned on whether, before 1776, Britain's American colonies had their own constitutional rights against the Crown--that is, corporate rights that were conceptually severable from the rights of their English contemporaries. Because that question was essentially insoluble, the Declaration's legal effects weren't clear in 1776. By extension, whether there were an independent, self-directing American ‘People’--one that could corporately agree to a set of shared principles and announce them in the Declaration--wasn't clear either.”

And The Declaration’s Judiciary, by Tyler Lindley — discussing judicial-power exclusivity, judicial independence, and the civil jury.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Trump v. Barbara I came across this interesting article in the National Security Law Journal on the children-of-diplomats exception: Violating the Constitution and Risking National Security: How the Children of Foreign Diplomats Born in the United States Become U.S. Citizens in Contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment.