David P. Currie, a constitutional scholar and professor at the University of Chicago Law School for 45 years, died yesterday in Chicago at the age of 71. Currie was the author of 19 books, and the University of Chicago Press was pleased to be the publisher of eight of them, including his magnificent works in the history of the Constitution of the United States.
In the two volumes of The Constitution in the Supreme Court, The First Hundred Years and The Second Century, Currie delivered both legal analysis and a narrative history of the highest court’s interpretation of the Constitution.
Currie turned to the legislative branch for his volumes of The Constitution in Congress. He analyzed the work of the first six Congresses in The Federalist Period and examined the period of Republican hegemony in The Jeffersonians. The antebellum years required two volumes: Democrats and Whigs, which covered the Jacksonian revolution and economic changes, and Descent into the Maelstrom, which was devoted to the great debate over slavery. Currie was working on the next volume in the series at the time of his death.
For the bicentennial of the Constitution, Currie wrote a book for the student and lay audiences, The Constitution of the United States: A Primer for the People, which we issued in a second edition in 2000. Currie was not only a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, but examined the foundational documents of other countries as well. We published one of his international studies, The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.
An obituary was released by the Law School and many comments from colleagues and students can be found on the Law School’s Faculty Blog.