Related Citations

  • Jesse Cross, “Done in Convention”: The Attestation Clause and the Declaration of Independence, 121 Yale L.J. 1236 (2012).

    Responding to commentators who’ve read the Attestation Clause “as a straightforward attempt by the Founders to import the spirit and values of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution” and arguing instead that the Clause, read in the context of legal practices of the time, instead “conveyed a much more nuanced and far less radical set of signals.”

  • Michael Coenen, The Significance of Signatures: Why the Framers Signed the Constitution and What They Meant by Doing So, 119 Yale L.J. 966 (2010).

    Arguing based on the records of the Constitutional convention and the practices of the Founding era that, rather than representing “the closing act of the Constitutional Convention,” the signing of the Constitution represented “the opening act of the ratification campaign that followed in the Constitution’s wake.”

  • David Barton, A Death-Struggle Between Two Civilizations: Evolution and the Law: Reflections on the Legacy of the Scopes Trial, 13 Regent U. L. Rev. 297, 312 (2000).

    Arguing that the Constitution reflects the theistic beliefs of the Declaration, in part, because the Attestation Clause “directly attaches” the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence.

  • Harry V. Jaffa, Graglia’s Quarrel with God: Atheism and Nihilism Masquerading as Constitutional Argument, Symposium on Natural Law: Forum, 4 S. Cal. Interdisciplinary L.J. 715, 728-29 (1995).

    Arguing based on the Clause’s “dual dating” through references to both “the Year of our Lord” and “the Year . . . of the Independence of the United States of America” that this links the origins of Christianity with the origins of our Independence, tying the Declaration’s themes into the very foundation of the Constitution.

  • Clarence Thomas, Higher Law Background of the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Are There Unenumerated Constitutional Rights: Symposium on Law and Public Policy, 12 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 63, 65 (1988).

    Arguing that the Declaration of Independence is incorporated into the Constitution and citing the Attestation Clause as a key piece of evidence for this proposition. “One should never lose sight of the fact that the last words of the original Constitution as written refer to the Declaration of Independence.”

  • Clarence Thomas, Toward a Plain Reading of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence in Constitutional Interpretation, 30 Howard L.J. 983, 987 (1987).

    Arguing that the reference to the Declaration alongside the Christian year in the Attestation Clause shows that the Declaration is incorporated into the Constitution and that “[t]he Declaration marks a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages.”