Author: Evan Gerstmann Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226288609 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
When the Supreme Court struck down Colorado's Amendment 2—which would have nullified all state and local laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination—it was widely regarded as a victory for gay rights. Yet many gays and lesbians still risk losing their jobs, custody of their children, and even their liberty under the law. Using the Colorado initiative as his focus, Gerstmann untangles the complex standards and subtle rhetoric the Supreme Court uses to apply the equal protection clause. The Court divides people into legal classes that receive varying levels of protection; gays and lesbians and other groups, such as the elderly and the poor, receive the least. Gerstmann reveals how these standards are used to favor certain groups over others, and also how Amendment 2 advocates used the Court's doctrine to convince voters that gays and lesbians were seeking "special rights" in Colorado. Concluding with a call for wholesale reform of equal-protection jurisprudence, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in fair, coherent, and truly equal protection under the law.
Author: Evan Gerstmann Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226288598 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
When the Supreme Court struck down Colorado's Amendment 2—which would have nullified all state and local laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination—it was widely regarded as a victory for gay rights. Yet many gays and lesbians still risk losing their jobs, custody of their children, and even their liberty under the law. Using the Colorado initiative as his focus, Gerstmann untangles the complex standards and subtle rhetoric the Supreme Court uses to apply the equal protection clause. The Court divides people into legal classes that receive varying levels of protection; gays and lesbians and other groups, such as the elderly and the poor, receive the least. Gerstmann reveals how these standards are used to favor certain groups over others, and also how Amendment 2 advocates used the Court's doctrine to convince voters that gays and lesbians were seeking "special rights" in Colorado. Concluding with a call for wholesale reform of equal-protection jurisprudence, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in fair, coherent, and truly equal protection under the law.
Author: Loïc Wacquant Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1509552197 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
At century’s close, American social scientists, policy analysts, philanthropists and politicians became obsessed with a fearsome and mysterious new group said to be ravaging the ghetto: the urban “underclass.” Soon the scarecrow category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe and agitated the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis. In this punchy book, Loïc Wacquant retraces the invention and metamorphoses of this racialized folk devil, from the structural conception of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to the behavioral notion of Washington think-tank experts to the neo-ecological formulation of sociologist William Julius Wilson. He uncovers the springs of the sudden irruption, accelerated circulation, and abrupt evaporation of the “underclass” from public debate, and reflects on the implications for the social epistemology of urban marginality. What accounts for the “lemming effect” that drew a generation of scholars of race and poverty over a scientific cliff? What are the conditions for the formation and bursting of “conceptual speculative bubbles”? What is the role of think tanks, journalism, and politics in imposing “turnkey problematics” upon social researchers? What are the special quandaries posed by the naming of dispossessed and dishonored populations in scientific discourse and how can we reformulate the explosive question of “race” to avoid these troubles? Answering these questions constitutes an exacting exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the tradition of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Bourdieu, and it issues in a clarion call for social scientists to defend their intellectual autonomy against the encroachments of outside powers, be they state officials, the media, think tanks, or philanthropic organizations. Compact, meticulous and forcefully argued, this study in the politics of social science knowledge will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, urban studies, ethnic studies, geography, intellectual history, the philosophy of science and public policy.
Author: Myron Magnet Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com ISBN: 1458761479 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 422
Book Description
Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare argues that the radical transformation of American culture that took place in the 1960s brought today's underclass - overwhelmingly urban, dismayingly minority - into existence. Lifestyle experimentation among the white middle class produced often catastrophic changes in attitudes toward marriage and parenting, the work ethic and dependency in those at the bottom of the social ladder, and closed down their exits to the middle class. Texas Governor George W. Bush's presidential campaign has highlighted the continuing importance of The Dream and the Nightmare. Bush read the book before his first campaign for governor in 1994, and, when he finally met Magnet in 1998, he acknowledged his debt to this work. Karl Rove, Bush's principal political adviser, cites it as a road map to the governor's philosophy of ''compassionate conservatism.''
Author: Evan Gerstmann Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521009522 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Does the Constitution protect the right to same-sex marriage? Much of the writing on this subject has been highly one-sided. This book takes a careful second look at the issue. Not only does it carefully look at the legal debate, but it also asks whether, in a democratic society, the courts should settle this question rather that the voters and it takes on the issue of whether such a court-created law could be effective in the face of public opposition. The book argues that this issue is one of the most significant constitutional issues facing society because it challenges society's commitment to the promise of true legal equality.
Author: Evan Gerstmann Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521709132 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
The revised and expanded second edition of Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution makes the case that the Constitution has long protected the right to marry, and that this protection includes the right to marry a person of the same gender. No other book makes this argument. This book addresses other issues, such as why same-sex marriage is completely different, both practically and constitutionally, from polygamy and incest, and it debunks the myth that pro-same-sex marriage decisions have created a backlash against either gays and lesbians or the Democratic Party.
Author: Myron Magnet Publisher: Encounter Books ISBN: 1641770538 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 151
Book Description
When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people’s representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan “experts,” an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court—the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language—he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas’s biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America’s future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.
Author: Evan Gerstmann
Author: Evan Gerstmann
Author: Loïc Wacquant
Author: Joseph Story
Author: Joseph STORY (One of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.)
Author: Myron Magnet
Author: Evan Gerstmann
Author: Joseph Story
Author: Evan Gerstmann
Author: Myron Magnet