Author: Douglas W. KmiecPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 122
Book Description
The American Constitutional Order
Author: Douglas W. KmiecPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 122
Book Description
American Law and the Constitutional Order
Author: Lawrence Meir FriedmanPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674025271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 604
Book Description
This is the standard reader in American law and constitutional development. The selections demonstrate that the legal order, once defined by society, helps in molding the various forces of the social life of that society. The essays cover the entire period of the American experience, from the colonies to postindustrial society. Additions to this enlarged edition include essays by Michael Parrish on the Depression and the New Deal; Abram Chayes on the role of the judge in public law litigation; David Vogel on social regulation; Harry N. Scheiber on doctrinal legacies and institutional innovations in the relation between law and the economy; and Lawrence M. Friedman on American legal history.
The Constitution as Social Design
Author: Gretchen RitterPublisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804754385
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
This book focuses on gender and civic membership in American constitutional politics from the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment through Second Wave Feminism. It examines how American civic membership is gendered, and how the terms of civic membership available to men and women shape their political identities, aspirations, and behavior. The book also explores the dynamics of American constitutional development through a focus on civic membership--a legal and political construct at the heart of the constitutional order. This is a book about gender politics and constitutional development, and about what each of these can tell us about the other. It considers the options and choices faced by womens rights activists in the United States as they voiced their claims for civic inclusion from Reconstruction through Second Wave Feminism, and it makes evident the limits of liberal citizenship for women.
Promises to Keep
Author: Donald G. NiemanPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190071656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
Widely considered the first history of US Constitutionalism that places African Americans at the center, Promises to Keep is a compelling overview of how conflict over African Americans' place in American society has shaped the Constitution, law, and our understanding of citizenship and rights. Both authoritative and accessible, this revised and expanded second edition incorporates key insights from the last three decades of scholarship and makes sense of recent developments in civil rights, from the War on Drugs to the rise of Black Lives Matter. Promises to Keep shows how African Americans have played a critical role in transforming the Constitution from a bulwark of slavery to a document that is truer to the nation's promise of equality. The book begins by examining debates about race from the Revolutionary Era at the Constitutional Convention and covers the establishment of civil rights protections during Reconstruction, the Jim Crow backlash, and the evolution of the civil rights movement, from the formation of the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People to legal victories and massive organized protests. Comprehensive in scope, this book moves from debates over slavery at the nation's founding to contemporary discussions of affirmative action, voting rights, mass incarceration, and police brutality. In the process, it provides readers with a historical perspective critical to understanding some of today's most important social and political issues.
States of Union
Author: Mark E. BrandonPublisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700619232
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
In two canonical decisions of the 1920s—Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters—the Supreme Court announced that family (including certain relations within it) was an institution falling under the Constitution’s protective umbrella. Since then, proponents of “family values” have claimed that a timeless form of family—nuclear and biological—is crucial to the constitutional order. Mark Brandon’s new book, however, challenges these claims. Brandon addresses debates currently roiling America—the regulation of procreation, the roles of women, the education of children, divorce, sexuality, and the meanings of marriage. He also takes on claims of scholars who attribute modern change in family law to mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions upholding privacy. He shows that the “constitutional” law of family has much deeper roots. Offering glimpses into American households across time, Brandon looks at the legal and constitutional norms that have aimed to govern those households and the lives within them. He argues that, well prior to the 1960s, the nature of families in America had been continually changing—especially during western expansion, but also in the founding era. He further contends that the monogamous nuclear family was codified only at the end of the nineteenth century as a response to Mormon polygamy, communal experiments, and Native American households. Brandon discusses the evolution of familial jurisprudence as applied to disputes over property, inheritance, work, reproduction, the status of women and children, the regulation of sex, and the legal limits to and constitutional significance of marriage. He shows how the Supreme Court’s famous decisions in the latter part of the twentieth century were largely responses to societal change, and he cites a wide range of cases that offer fresh insight into the ways the legal system responded to various forms of family life. More than a historical overview, the book also considers the development of same-sex marriage as a political and legal issue in our time. States of Union is a groundbreaking volume that explains how family came to be “in” the Constitution, what it has meant for family to be constitutionally significant, and what the implications of that significance are for the constitutional order and for families.
America's Constitution
Author: Akhil Reed AmarPublisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588364879
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 672
Book Description
In America’s Constitution, one of this era’s most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of one of the world’s great political texts. Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it. We all know this much: the Constitution is neither immutable nor perfect. Amar shows us how the story of this one relatively compact document reflects the story of America more generally. (For example, much of the Constitution, including the glorious-sounding “We the People,” was lifted from existing American legal texts, including early state constitutions.) In short, the Constitution was as much a product of its environment as it was a product of its individual creators’ inspired genius. Despite the Constitution’s flaws, its role in guiding our republic has been nothing short of amazing. Skillfully placing the document in the context of late-eighteenth-century American politics, America’s Constitution explains, for instance, whether there is anything in the Constitution that is unamendable; the reason America adopted an electoral college; why a president must be at least thirty-five years old; and why–for now, at least–only those citizens who were born under the American flag can become president. From his unique perspective, Amar also gives us unconventional wisdom about the Constitution and its significance throughout the nation’s history. For one thing, we see that the Constitution has been far more democratic than is conventionally understood. Even though the document was drafted by white landholders, a remarkably large number of citizens (by the standards of 1787) were allowed to vote up or down on it, and the document’s later amendments eventually extended the vote to virtually all Americans. We also learn that the Founders’ Constitution was far more slavocratic than many would acknowledge: the “three fifths” clause gave the South extra political clout for every slave it owned or acquired. As a result, slaveholding Virginians held the presidency all but four of the Republic’s first thirty-six years, and proslavery forces eventually came to dominate much of the federal government prior to Lincoln’s election. Ambitious, even-handed, eminently accessible, and often surprising, America’s Constitution is an indispensable work, bound to become a standard reference for any student of history and all citizens of the United States.
American Constitutional Law
Author: Donald P. KommersPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742526877
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1128
Book Description
Designed for an undergraduate course in US constitutional law, the casebook takes a liberal arts approach, tracing constitutional doctrine and policy back to their foundation in social, moral, and political theory, and prompting students to engage the great questions of political life addressed by the Constitution and its interpretation. Opinions of the US Supreme Court constitute the core of the documents. The first edition was published in 1998; the second adds and updates topics. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
The Arc of Due Process in American Constitutional Law
Author: E. Thomas SullivanPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199990808
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
In The Arc of Due Process in American Constitutional Law, Sullivan and Massaro identify the historical underpinnings of due process while describing the evolution of the American due process doctrine.
The New Constitutional Order
Author: Mark TushnetPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825555
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
In his 1996 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton announced that the "age of big government is over." Some Republicans accused him of cynically appropriating their themes, while many Democrats thought he was betraying the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. Mark Tushnet argues that Clinton was stating an observed fact: the emergence of a new constitutional order in which the aspiration to achieve justice directly through law has been substantially chastened. Tushnet argues that the constitutional arrangements that prevailed in the United States from the 1930s to the 1990s have ended. We are now in a new constitutional order--one characterized by divided government, ideologically organized parties, and subdued constitutional ambition. Contrary to arguments that describe a threatened return to a pre-New Deal constitutional order, however, this book presents evidence that our current regime's animating principle is not the old belief that government cannot solve any problems but rather that government cannot solve any more problems. Tushnet examines the institutional arrangements that support the new constitutional order as well as Supreme Court decisions that reflect it. He also considers recent developments in constitutional scholarship, focusing on the idea of minimalism as appropriate to a regime with chastened ambitions. Tushnet discusses what we know so far about the impact of globalization on domestic constitutional law, particularly in the areas of international human rights and federalism. He concludes with predictions about the type of regulation we can expect from the new order. This is a major new analysis of the constitutional arrangements in the United States. Though it will not be received without controversy, it offers real explanatory and predictive power and provides important insights to both legal theorists and political scientists.
Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil
Author: Mark A. GraberPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139457071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil , first published in 2006, concerns what is entailed by pledging allegiance to a constitutional text and tradition saturated with concessions to evil. The Constitution of the United States was originally understood as an effort to mediate controversies between persons who disputed fundamental values, and did not offer a vision of the good society. In order to form a 'more perfect union' with slaveholders, late-eighteenth-century citizens fashioned a constitution that plainly compelled some injustices and was silent or ambiguous on other questions of fundamental right. This constitutional relationship could survive only as long as a bisectional consensus was required to resolve all constitutional questions not settled in 1787. Dred Scott challenges persons committed to human freedom to determine whether antislavery northerners should have provided more accommodations for slavery than were constitutionally strictly necessary or risked the enormous destruction of life and property that preceded Lincoln's new birth of freedom.