Stuart Ford (University of Illinois at Chicago - UIC School of Law) has posted The Original Meaning of the Duty to 'Promote the General Welfare' in the Constitution on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In recent decades, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the role and meaning of the Preamble in constitutional law. If the Preamble is to play a role in constitutional interpretation, however, it is necessary to understand the meaning of the individual words and phrases within the Preamble. This Article contributes to our understanding of the Preamble by presenting the first comprehensive study of the original meaning of the duty to “promote the general Welfare.” It looks at early dictionaries and hundreds of examples of the use of “general welfare” in eighteenth century America to understand what that phrase would have meant to the public in 1788, when the Constitution was ratified.
This analysis demonstrates that the concept of "the general welfare" had a nuanced and widely accepted definition. It was almost universally accepted that all governments had a duty to promote the general welfare of their subjects. In fact, the duty to promote the general welfare was viewed as one of the most important goals of every government. Elected officials, in particular, were expected to place the general welfare of those they governed ahead of their personal interests. This meant striving to promote the health, wellbeing, happiness and prosperity of all members of society. The decision to include the duty to promote the general welfare in the Preamble of the Constitution both represented the culmination of more than a century of political thought and recognized the importance of that duty to eighteenth century Americans.
