The Supreme Court in Conference (1940-1985) PDF Download

Author: Del Dickson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195126327
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1035

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Book Description
The Supreme Court in Conference offers a fascinating and unprecedented look at the private debates between Justices on nearly 300 landmark cases from 1940-1985. Major decisions such as Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education are covered and the notes of Justices Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, Robert Jackson, Harold Burton, Tom Clark, Earl Warren and William Brennan are opened to shed light on what goes on behind the closed doors of the secretive conference room.In this unique and revealing work on some of the most profound rulings made at a turbulent time in American history, the reader is given insight into how and why certain decisions were reached. With expert editing by Del Dickson--who provides annotations and an introduction to each case, placing them in legal and historical context--cases on issues such as free speech, the rights of the accused, religion, Presidential power, equal protection, affirmative action and the death penalty are discussed. Dickson also includes a lively and incisive history of the Supreme Court, from its beginning to the present, illuminating how the conference works, how it has evolved, its various animosities, triumphant successes and glaring failures.As the first major reference work on this subject, this easy-to-use book offers the most reliable evidence available on the internal workings of the Supreme Court. It is the ideal source for scholars, law students, historians and anyone interested in how Supreme Court decisions are truly made.

Author: Tracey Maclin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199795479
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
The application of the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule has divided the justices of the Supreme Court for nearly a century. This book traces the rise and fall of the exclusionary rule with insight and behind-the-scenes access into the Court's thinking.

Author: Rawn James
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Harry S. Truman’s presidency is his judicial legacy, with even the finest of Truman biographies neglecting to consider the influence he had on the Supreme Court. Yet, as Rawn James lays out in engaging detail, president Harry Truman successfully molded the high court into a judicial body that appeared to actively support his administration’s political agenda. In rulings that sparked controversy in their own time, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld Truman’s most contentious policies, including actions to restrict free speech, expand civil rights, and manage labor union unrest. The Truman Court: Law and the Limits of Loyalty argues that the years between FDR’s death in 1945 and Chief Justice Earl Warren’s confirmation in 1953—the dawn of the Cold War—were, contrary to widespread belief, important years in Supreme Court history. Never before or since has a president so quickly and completely changed the ideological and temperamental composition of the Court. With remarkable swiftness and certainty, Truman constructed a Court on which he relied to lend constitutional credence to his political agenda.

Author: Robert M. Lichtman
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700632727
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
In Barred by Congress: How a Mormon, a Socialist, and an African American Elected by the People Were Excluded from Office Robert M. Lichtman provides a definitive history of congressional exclusion and expulsion cases. Lichtman offers a timely investigation of the vital constitutional issues, debated since the nation’s founding, concerning permissible and impermissible grounds for excluding a member-elect or expelling a member from Congress. Barred by Congress begins with an exhaustive review of the numerous congressional exclusion and expulsion cases in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before focusing on the stories of the last three members-elect to be excluded from Congress: a Mormon, a Socialist, and an African American—each an outsider in American politics—excluded notwithstanding election by the voters. Lichtman illuminates each of these three remarkable individuals with a detailed biographical sketch. Brigham H. Roberts was a Utah Mormon whose exclusion from the House of Representatives in 1900 was fueled by a nationwide anti-Mormon campaign waged by William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper empire, a controversy centered on the issue of polygamy. Victor L. Berger, a Socialist Party leader and editor of an antiwar Milwaukee newspaper during World War I, was elected to the House despite the efforts of the Wilson administration to derail his campaign by indicting him under the Espionage Act; he was excluded in 1919 and again in 1920. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was a Baptist minister and civil rights advocate who represented the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the House of Representatives from 1945 until his exclusion in 1967. In Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court ruled that Powell’s exclusion by the House violated the Constitution, a decision that, a half century later, remains established law but still does not provide complete assurance that the people will be able to (in Alexander Hamilton’s words) “choose whom they please to govern them.”

Author: Ralph Rossum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000074943
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1107

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Book Description
American Constitutional Law 11e, Volume II provides a comprehensive account of the nation's defining document, examining how its provisions were originally understood by those who drafted and ratified it, and how they have since been interpreted by the Supreme Court, Congress, the President, lower federal courts, and state judiciaries. Clear and accessible chapter introductions and a careful balance between classic and recent cases provide students with a sense of how the law has been understood and construed over the years. The 11th Edition now includes several landmark First Amendment cases, including Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (2018), Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Beccera (2018), Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017) and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018). It also includes Carpenter v. United States (2018). A revamped and expanded companion website offers access to even more additional cases, an archive of primary documents, and links to online resources, making this text essential for any constitutional law course.

Author: John W. Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313081328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Affirmative Action recounts the fascinating history of a civil rights provision considered vital to protecting and promoting equality, but still bitterly contested in the courts—and in the court of public opinion. "Special consideration" or "reverse discrimination"? This examination traces the genesis and development of affirmative action and the continuing controversy that constitutes the story of racial and gender preferences. It pays attention to the individuals, the events, and the ideas that spawned federal and selected state affirmative action policies—and the resistance to those policies. Perhaps most important, it probes the key legal challenges to affirmative action in the nation's courts. The controversy over affirmative action in America has been marked by a persistent tension between its advocates, who emphasize the necessity of overcoming historical patterns of racial and gender injustice, and its critics, who insist on the integrity of color and gender blindness. In the wake of related U.S. Supreme Court decisions of 2007, Affirmative Action brings the story of one of the most embattled public policy issues of the last half century up to date, demonstrating that social justice cannot simply be legislated into existence, nor can voices on either side of the debate be ignored.

Author: David Sloss
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199364028
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
This book provides the first detailed history of the Constitution's treaty supremacy rule. It describes a process of invisible constitutional change. The treaty supremacy rule was a bedrock principle of constitutional law for more than 150 years. It provided that treaties are supreme over state law and that courts have a constitutional duty to apply treaties that conflict with state laws. The rule ensured that state governments did not violate U.S. treaty obligations without authorization from the federal political branches. In 1945, the United States ratified the UN Charter, which obligates nations to promote human rights “for all without distinction as to race.” In 1950, a California court applied the Charter’s human rights provisions along with the traditional supremacy rule to invalidate a state law that discriminated against Japanese nationals. The implications were shocking: the decision implied that the United States had abrogated Jim Crow laws throughout the South by ratifying the UN Charter. Conservatives reacted by lobbying for a constitutional amendment, known as the Bricker Amendment, to abolish the treaty supremacy rule. The amendment never passed, but Bricker's supporters achieved their goals through de facto constitutional change. Before 1945, the treaty supremacy rule was a mandatory constitutional rule that applied to all treaties. The de facto Bricker Amendment converted the rule into an optional rule that applies only to “self-executing” treaties. Under the modern rule, state governments are allowed to violate national treaty obligations — including international human rights obligations — that are embodied in “non-self-executing” treaties.

Author: Ralph Rossum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000124355
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 789

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Book Description
American Constitutional Law 11e, Volume I provides a comprehensive account of the nation's defining document, examining how its provisions were originally understood by those who drafted and ratified it, and how they have since been interpreted by the Supreme Court, Congress, the President, lower federal courts, and state judiciaries. Clear and accessible chapter introductions and a careful balance between classic and recent cases provide students with a sense of how the law has been understood and construed over the years. The 11th Edition has been fully revised to include several new cases, including Trump v. Hawaii (2018), in which Chief Justice Roberts held that Korematsu v. United States "has been overruled in the court of history"; Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (2018), in which Justice Alito’s majority opinion provides the most compelling argument to date against federal commandeering of state officials; and Sveen v. Melin (2018), a Contract Clause case that shows the Court’s continuing refusal to give a textualist reading of that provision, even in the face of Justice Gorsuch’s compelling and amusing dissent. A revamped and expanded companion website offers access to even more additional cases, an archive of primary documents, and links to online resources, making this text essential for any constitutional law course.

Author: Michael J. Klarman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198042000
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A splendid account of the Supreme Court's rulings on race in the first half of the twentieth century, From Jim Crow To Civil Rights earned rave reviews and won the Bancroft Prize for History in 2005. Now, in this marvelously abridged, paperback edition, Michael J. Klarman has compressed his acclaimed study into tight focus around one major case--Brown v. Board of Education--making the path-breaking arguments of his original work accessible to a broader audience of general readers and students. In this revised and condensed edition, Klarman illuminates the impact of the momentous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He offers a richer, more complex understanding of this pivotal decision, going behind the scenes to examine the justices' deliberations and reconstruct why they found the case so difficult to decide. He recaps his famous backlash thesis, arguing that Brown was more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to change than for encouraging civil rights protest, and that it was only the resulting violence that transformed northern opinion and led to the landmark legislation of the 1960s. Klarman also sheds light on broader questions such as how judges decide cases; how much they are influenced by legal, political, and personal considerations; the relationship between Supreme Court decisions and social change; and finally, how much Court decisions simply reflect societal values and how much they shape those values. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the most important decisions in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. Klarman's brilliant analysis of this landmark case illuminates the course of American race relations as it highlights the relationship between law and social reform. Acclaim for From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: "A major achievement. It bestows upon its fortunate readers prodigious research, nuanced judgment, and intellectual independence." --Randall Kennedy, The New Republic "Magisterial." --The New York Review of Books "A sweeping, erudite, and powerfully argued book...unfailingly interesting." --Wilson Quarterly

Author: Ralph A. Rossum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429711255
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 2570

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Book Description
American Constitutional Law provides a comprehensive account of the nation's defining document. Based on the premise that the study of the Constitution and constitutional law is of fundamental importance to understanding the principles, prospects, and problems of America, the volumes in this set put current events in terms of what those who initially drafted and ratified the Constitution sought to accomplish. The authors examine the constitutional thought of the founders, as well as interpretations of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, Congress, the President, lower federal courts, and state judiciaries. Volume I focuses on federal rights and powers, and volume II focuses on individuals' rights and responsibilities. Available individually or as a two-volume set, they are perfect for a one- or two-semester course on constitutional law and civil liberties.