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Denial of breach happens all the time. There are close cases, where the denial is plausible. However, many cases of such denial are mere posturing to escape the known penalty for the breach. Where there is an arbiter, and good sense, the sham denials will fail. Where there is no arbiter, it still comes down to breach. Again, in our escape from England, the only arbiter was our willingness to fight for our freedom. Sometimes it comes to that. In contract law it is called self-help, and all other things being equal, it is perfectly acceptable.

As for the analogy of the country club, no, I insist I did not choose it; I found it already in use in the thread. Noting that you had accepted it as a valid way to discuss the issue, I merely tried to point out an absurdity in following your logic to its natural endpoint.

As for the validity of the contract analogy, your quote of Madison certainly suggests that he did regard it as a valid analogy. Again, you appear to be taking flight to some nebulous super-contract concept because the ordinary law of contract is not helping your case.

As for his point, that no state should leave the Union at will on the basis of conflicting constitutional interpretations concerning slavery, he is certainly persuasive. However, his words are not law. Indeed, in the same letter he asked that these comments not be published for fear they would be misconstrued, precisely because, as he acknowledged, they were a woefully incomplete treatment of the subject matter. And they were incomplete, because the notion of leaving for light causes (“at will”) is always in tension with the natural right to be free of tyranny, what I will term a “for cause” separation, and such tension begs for more analysis than he provided.

Many things in the law deal with resolving the conflict between two or more legal principles that apply to the same subject matter. In general, the solution is to try to accommodate as many of those conflicts as possible, but where such conflict cannot be resolved, the higher authority must trump the lower authority. The inviolable natural right of secession from tyranny, based on the God-given right to be free, was the primordial basis for the American Revolution; it was, and is, the peak of the mountain from which flows all other law, and that must surely trump any power of the non-seceding states to compel a state to remain a prisoner to tyranny against its will.

BTW, contract is an immense concept. It entails a great deal more than that paper you sign when you buy a house. It is founded on the bedrock principle of keeping your promise. Even the most profound of transactions, with enormous consequences, can be describes in terms of contract, as, for example, the covenant of God with Abraham. In the grand scheme of things, I would think our Constitution, as important as it is, comes in at a significantly lower notch than that.

As for Articles I and IV, just to be sure, I went back and reread those articles. While I can find language that assumes a continuity of the union, I can find nothing, not even as a matter of remote inference, that postulates whether such union should be sustained involuntarily when tyranny spoils the stew.

An affirmative denial of the right to leave for cause is a tad more complex a concept than presumed continuity, and the fact that the Declaration specifically asserts a natural right to throw off tyranny makes it seem unlikely, to me, that the same group of people (more or less) would turn right around and hide in the Constitution a diametrically opposite denial of such right in some highly attenuated “anti-secession penumbra” that only the chosen can see in the text. I am blind to it. You would do me a great kindness if you could explain, in rigorous terms, just how you build your inference of the same.

As for your rant against the South’s implementation of their right of secession, it is beyond the present scope of my argument to evaluate the relative niceties of the war in the South. I am arguing for the principle. Anybody knows that principles can be botched in practice. Perhaps we can defer that portion of the discussion until we come to terms about the propriety of unilateral, peaceful secession?

As for priority of Constitutional law over international law, in general I agree with you, except as imposed upon by lawful treaty, which in any case I do not think even treaties should or can abrogate any fundamental rights under the Constitution.

However, my point in citing international law is that because there is no unambiguous constitutional provision prohibiting secession, and there is international consensus that secession is always on the table for an oppressed people, therefore secession is on the table.

As for Nuremburg, the point there, and I only belabor it because you will not deny it directly but you will not admit to it either, is that its not hard to see that Germany’s genocidal laws were wrong, and that it was right to trump them with the common sense of humanity that genocide is so obviously criminal there need be no written law against it to find guilt in the breach of it.

And if that is true at the extremes, and I hope you agree that it is, then it may be true under less severe conditions, in proportion to the circumstances.

I will now be retiring from this conversation for the evening. If you are still interested in responding, I’ll be back later. G’night.