Download or read book Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution written by Myron Magnet and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution written by Myron Magnet and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas written by Corey Robin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin – one of the foremost analysts of the right – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.
Download or read book Created Equal written by Michael Pack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on historical documents and exclusive interviews, authors tell the inspiring story of Clarence Thomas's rise from a childhood of poverty and prejudice in the segregated South to Supreme Court Justice. Companion to blockbuster documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, but a fascinating stand alone read, as well! *The full story behind the wildly successful documentary film, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words* Born into dire poverty in the segregated South and abandoned by his father as a child, Justice Clarence Thomas triumphed over seemingly insurmountable odds to become one of the most influential justices on the Supreme Court. Yet after three decades of honorable service, few know him beyond his contentious confirmation and the surrounding media firestorm. Who is Justice Clarence Thomas, in his own words? In the follow-up to the wildly successful documentary by the same name, Created Equal builds on dozens of hours of groundbreaking, one-on-one interviews with Thomas to share a new, expanded account of his powerful story for the first time. Producer Michael Pack and Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who worked alongside Thomas during his confirmation, dive deep into the Justice’s story. Drawing on a rich array of historical documents and unreleased conversations with Thomas, his wife, and those who knew him best, Created Equal is a timeless account of faith, race, power, and personal resilience.
Download or read book My Grandfather s Son written by Clarence Thomas and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words. Thomas speaks out, revealing the pieces of his life he holds dear, detailing the suffering and injustices he has overcome, including the polarizing Senate hearing involving a former aide, Anita Hill, and the depression and despair it created in his own life and the lives of those closest to him. In this candid and deeply moving memoir, a quintessential American tale of hardship and grit, Clarence Thomas recounts his astonishing journey for the first time.
Download or read book Uncertain Justice written by Laurence Tribe and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An assessment of how the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is significantly influencing the nation's laws and reinterpreting the Constitution includes in-depth analysis of recent rulings and their implications.
Download or read book Understanding Clarence Thomas written by Ralph A. Rossum and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though Clarence Thomas has been a Supreme Court Justice for nearly 25 years and has written close to five hundred opinions, legal scholars and pundits have given him short shrift, often, in fact, dismissing him as a narrow partisan, a silent presence on the bench, an enemy of his race, a tool of Antonin Scalia. And yet, as this book makes clear, few justices of the Supreme Court have developed as clear and consistent a constitutional jurisprudence as Thomas. Also little known but apparent in Ralph A. Rossum's detailed assessment of the justice's jurisprudence is how profound Thomas's impact has been in certain areas of constitutional law—not only on the bench but also even among some of his erstwhile disparaging critics. During his years on the Court, Thomas has pursued an original general meaning approach to constitutional interpretation; he has been unswayed by claims of precedent—by the gradual build-up of interpretations that, to his mind, come to distort the original meaning of the constitutional provision in question, leading to muddled decisions and contradictory conclusions. In a close reading of Thomas's hundreds of well-crafted, extensively researched, and passionately argued majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions, Rossum explores how the justice applies this original meaning approach to questions of constitutional structure as they relate to federalism; substantive rights found in the First Amendment's religion and free speech and press clauses, the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms, the Fifth Amendment's restrictions on the taking of private property, and the Fourteenth Amendment regarding abortion rights; and various criminal procedural provisions found in the Ex Post Facto Clauses and the Bill of Rights. Thomas grounds his original general meaning approach in the Declaration of Independence and its "self evident" truth that "all men are created equal"; that truth, he insists, "preced[es] and underl[ies] the Constitution." Understanding Clarence Thomas traces the many consequences that, for Thomas, flow from the centrality of that "self evident" truth, and how these shape his opinions in cases concerning desegregation, racial preference, and voting rights. The most thorough explication ever given of the jurisprudence of this prolific but little-understood justice, this work offers a unique opportunity to grasp not just the meaning of Clarence Thomas's opinions but their significance for the Supreme Court and constitutional interpretation in our day.
Download or read book The Court and the World written by Stephen Breyer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original, far-reaching, and timely book, Justice Stephen Breyer examines the work of the Supreme Court of the United States in an increasingly interconnected world, a world in which all sorts of activity, both public and private—from the conduct of national security policy to the conduct of international trade—obliges the Court to understand and consider circumstances beyond America’s borders. Written with unique authority and perspective, The Court and the World reveals an emergent reality few Americans observe directly but one that affects the life of every one of us. Here is an invaluable understanding for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
Download or read book Supreme Discomfort written by Kevin Merida and published by Crown. This book was released on 2008-04-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Justice Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court’s most reclusive member [and] a prime candidate for a careful, fair-minded biography. In delivering it, Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher have done some quiet justice of their own.”—Washington Post There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood African American in our public life than Clarence Thomas. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a haunting portrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by much of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society, internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural poverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to the pinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions on crime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposed him to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he is himself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited from racially conscious admissions policies. Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reported work that features testimony from friends and foes alike who have never spoken in public about Thomas before—including a candid conversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, Antonin Scalia. It offers a long-overdue window into a man who straddles two different worlds and is uneasy in both—and whose divided personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply influence American life for years to come.
Download or read book The Dream and the Nightmare written by Myron Magnet and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.''
Download or read book Government Against Itself written by Daniel DiSalvo and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Daniel DiSalvo contends that the power of public sector unions is too often inimical to the public interest"--
Download or read book The Founders at Home The Building of America 1735 1817 written by Myron Magnet and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the history of America's Founding Fathers through their words and actions but also through the architectural treasures of the homes they built while they conspired to change the world.
Download or read book Reimagining Equality written by Anita Hill and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Home : a place that provides access to every opportunity America has to offer.--A.H."--P. [vii]
Download or read book On Faith written by Antonin Scalia and published by Crown Forum. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Faith is an inspiring collection of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia's reflections on his own faith, on the challenges that religious believers face in modern America, and on the religious freedoms protected by the Constitution. Featuring a personal introduction by Justice Scalia's son Father Paul Scalia, this volume will enrich every reader's understanding of the legendary justice. Antonin Scalia reflected deeply on matters of religion and shared his insights with many audiences over the course of his remarkable career. As a Supreme Court justice for three decades, he vigorously defended the American constitutional tradition of allowing religion a prominent place in the public square. As a man of faith, he recognized the special challenges of living a distinctively religious life in modern America, and he inspired other believers to meet those challenges. This volume contains Justice Scalia's incisive thoughts on these matters, laced with his characteristic wit. It includes outstanding speeches featured in Scalia Speaks and also draws from his Supreme Court opinions and his articles. In addition to the introduction by Fr. Scalia, other highlights include Fr. Scalia's beautiful homily at his father's funeral Mass and reminiscences from various friends and law clerks whose lives were influenced by Antonin Scalia's faith.
Download or read book Dissent and the Supreme Court written by Melvin I. Urofsky and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Highly illuminating ... for anyone interested in the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the American democracy, lawyer and layperson alike." —The Los Angeles Review of Books In his major work, acclaimed historian and judicial authority Melvin Urofsky examines the great dissents throughout the Court’s long history. Constitutional dialogue is one of the ways in which we as a people reinvent and reinvigorate our democratic society. The Supreme Court has interpreted the meaning of the Constitution, acknowledged that the Court’s majority opinions have not always been right, and initiated a critical discourse about what a particular decision should mean before fashioning subsequent decisions—largely through the power of dissent. Urofsky shows how the practice grew slowly but steadily, beginning with the infamous and now overturned case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) during which Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion upheld slavery and ending with the present age of incivility, in which reasoned dialogue seems less and less possible. Dissent on the court and off, Urofsky argues in this major work, has been a crucial ingredient in keeping the Constitution alive and must continue to be so.
Download or read book First Among Equals written by Kenneth W. Starr and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2008-12-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's United States Supreme Court consists of nine intriguingly varied justices and one overwhelming contradiction: Compared to its revolutionary predecessor, the Rehnquist Court appears deceptively passive, yet it stands as dramatically ready to defy convention as the Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s. Now Kenneth W. Starr-who served as clerk for one chief justice, argued twenty-five cases as solicitor general before the Supreme Court, and is widely regarded as one of the nation's most distinguished practitioners of constitutional law-offers us an incisive and unprecedented look at the paradoxes, the power, and the people of the highest court in the land. In First Among Equals Ken Starr traces the evolution of the Supreme Court from its beginnings, examines major Court decisions of the past three decades, and uncovers the sometimes surprising continuity between the precedent-shattering Warren Court and its successors under Burger and Rehnquist. He shows us, as no other author ever has, the very human justices who shape our law, from Sandra Day O'Connor, the Court's most pivotal-and perhaps most powerful-player, to Clarence Thomas, its most original thinker. And he explores the present Court's evolution into a lawyerly tribunal dedicated to balance and consensus on the one hand, and zealous debate on hotly contested issues of social policy on the other. On race, the Court overturned affirmative action and held firm to an undeviating color-blind standard. On executive privilege, the Court rebuffed three presidents, both Republican and Democrat, who fought to increase their power at the expense of rival branches of government. On the 2000 presidential election, the Court prevented what it deemed a runaway Florida court from riding roughshod over state law-illustrating how in our system of government, the Supreme Court is truly the first among equals. Compelling and supremely readable, First Among Equals sheds new light on the most frequently misunderstood legal pillar of American life.
Download or read book Cosmic Constitutional Theory written by J. Harvie Wilkinson and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-03-12 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What underlies this development? In this concise and highly engaging work, Federal Appeals Court Judge and noted author (From Brown to Bakke) J. Harvie Wilkinson argues that America's most brilliant legal minds have launched a set of cosmic constitutional theories that, for all their value, are undermining self-governance.
