Stuart Ford (University of Illinois at Chicago – UIC School of Law) has posted To Insure Domestic Tranquility and Provide for the Common Defence: The Preamble's Concern with Internal and External Threats (44 pages) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
There is a growing scholarly movement to rehabilitate the Preamble as a tool for understanding and interpreting the Constitution. While there have been a number of articles arguing that the Preamble should be used to interpret the Constitution, there have been few articles that explore what the specific words and phrases in the Preamble mean. Yet understanding the meaning of the phrases in the Preamble is a prerequisite to using it to interpret the Constitution. This Article fills a gap in the Preamble literature by exploring the origins and meaning of the phrases "insure domestic tranquility" and "provide for the common defence."
Both phrases have a rich history that begins in sixteenth century England and extends to eighteenth century America. Both phrases were widely used in the decades preceding the Constitutional Convention and both had well-understood public meanings. Those pre-existing public understandings can be used to understand what the Preamble means when it imposes a duty on the federal government to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defence. As this Article shows using contemporaneous documents, providing for the common defence referred to the obligation to supply the means necessary to protect the United States from attack, while insuring domestic tranquility referred to the government's obligation to ensure peace and calm within the country. These two goals complement each other with domestic tranquility focusing on internal threats and the common defence focusing on external threats.
A related article, noted on this blog previously, is Stuart Ford, The Role of the Preamble: Evidence from the Constitutional Convention and Ratification Debates (Texas A & M L. Rev., forthcoming 2025).
I think it's methodologically appropriate for originalists to look at the preamble to resolve genuine ambiguities in the Constitution's text. But I also think people tend to look at the preamble when they can;t find what they're looking for in the substantive part of the Constitution.
Posted at 6:18 AM