Constitutional law scholars tend to focus on decisions involving abortion, same-sex marriage, desegregation, and administrative law, ignoring one of the 20th century's most contentious legal battles: creditors' challenge to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's abrogation of the gold standard, and contemporaneous invalidation of “gold clauses” in contractual debt obligations, in 1933. The New Deal spawned many events of interest to constitutional historians—such as FDR's court-packing scheme, the abandonment of the Lochner line of cases, and the Carolene Products decision—but until the publication of Sebastian Edwards's American Default in 2018, the great debt default of 1933-1935 had unaccountably been largely overlooked. In the pre-“woke” era, constitutional battles were over economics, not culture, and no aspect of the economy is more fundamental than money.
