Arshan Barzani (Yale Law School) has posted The Inflation Constitution on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The Constitution is dead, at least when it comes to its monetary provisions. The Judicial, Presidential, and Congressional Compensation Clauses, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, the Twenty-Dollars Clause, and the Migration or Importation Clause do not provide for amounts to rise with inflation or fall with deflation. They all prescribe fixed amounts. The Framers, who were intimately familiar with inflation and deflation, repeatedly rejected provisions that would have automatically offset their effects.
Recommended. On the Twenty-Dollar Clause, the original meaning likely refers to the Spanish silver dollar or coins containing an equivalent amount of silver. See Originalist Methodology.
