The Age of Federalism Quotes

“The state legislatures, as Madison and many another viewed them, had become a babel of narrow-minded parochial concerns, their members men of selfish interests and untutored understanding, oblivious of minority rights, passing unjust laws (such as legal tender acts whereby debts people owed each other could be paid in worthless currency), and all unchecked by any overriding vision of the public good or what it might consist of.”
― Stanley Elkins, The Age of Federalism

“The fact was that a national judiciary as a branch of government was still something of an abstraction, substantially less real than were the other two. Far more real to Federalist and Antifederalist alike were the already existing legal institutions of the states, going well back into colonial times and having been little altered by the Revolution, and the strong vested interests they had accumulated through time and tradition...”
― Eric L. McKitrick, The Age of Federalism