Download or read book Slavery and the Supreme Court 1825 1861 written by Earl M. Maltz and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During America's turbulent antebellum era, the Supreme Court decided important cases—most famously Dred Scott—that spoke to sectional concerns and shaped the nation's response to the slavery question. Much scholarship has been devoted to individual cases and to the Taney Court, but this is the first comprehensive examination of the major slavery cases that came before the Court between 1825 and 1861. Earl Maltz presents a detailed analysis of all eight cases and explains how each fit into the slavery politics of its time, beginning with The Antelope, heard by the John Marshall Court, and continuing with the seven other cases taken before the Roger Taney Court: The Amistad, Groves v. Slaughter, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Strader v. Graham, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Ableman v. Booth, and Kentucky v. Denison. Case by case, Maltz identifies the political and legal forces that shaped each of the judicial outcomes while clarifying the evolution of the Court's slavery-related jurisprudence. He reveals the beliefs of each justice about the morality of slavery and the judicial role in constitutional cases to show how their actions were determined by a complex interaction of political and doctrinal considerations. Thus he offers a more nuanced understanding of the antebellum federal judiciary, showing how the decision in Prigg hinged on views about federalism as well as attitudes toward human freedom, while the question of which slaves were freed in The Antelope depended more on complex fact-finding than on a condemnation of the slave trade. Maltz also challenges the view that the Taney Court simply mirrored Southern interests and argues that, despite Dred Scott, the overall record of the Court was not particularly proslavery. Although the progression of the Court's decisions reflects a change in the tenor of the conflict over slavery, the aftermath of those decisions illustrates the limits of the Court's ability to change the dynamic that governed political struggles over such divisive issues. As the first accessible account of all of these cases, Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825–1861 underscores the Court's limited capability to resolve the intractable political conflicts that sharply divided our nation during this period.
Download or read book Fugitive Slave on Trial written by Earl M. Maltz and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the case of a runaway slave who was tracked to Boston by his owner. Compellingly details the struggle over his fate and how that became a focal point for national controversy. Reveals how the case became one of the most dramatic and widely publicized events in the long-running conflict over the issue of fugitive slaves.
Download or read book Southern Slavery and the Law 1619 1860 written by Thomas D. Morris and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-01-21 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first comprehensive history of the evolving relationship between American slavery and the law from colonial times to the Civil War. As Thomas Morris clearly shows, racial slavery came to the English colonies as an institution without strict legal definitions or guidelines. Specifically, he demonstrates that there was no coherent body of law that dealt solely with slaves. Instead, more general legal rules concerning inheritance, mortgages, and transfers of property coexisted with laws pertaining only to slaves. According to Morris, southern lawmakers and judges struggled to reconcile a social order based on slavery with existing English common law (or, in Louisiana, with continental civil law.) Because much was left to local interpretation, laws varied between and even within states. In addition, legal doctrine often differed from local practice. And, as Morris reveals, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, tensions mounted between the legal culture of racial slavery and the competing demands of capitalism and evangelical Christianity.
Download or read book Report of the Lemmon Slave Case written by New York (State). Court of Appeals and published by . This book was released on 1861 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dred Scott v Sandford Slavery and Freedom before the American Civil War written by Amy Van Zee and published by ABDO Publishing Company. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US Supreme Court is the head of the judicial branch of the federal government. It is the highest court in the land, with thousands of cases appealed to it every year. One of those history-making cases was Dred Scott v. Sanford, which addressed slavery and freedom before the Civil War. Readers will follow this case from beginning to end, including the social and political climates that led up to it and the effects it had after the court made its ruling. Major players and key events are discussed, including Dred and Harriet Scott, Judge Roger B. Taney, James Buchanan, John Sanford, John Emerson, and Eliza Scott. Compelling chapters and informative sidebars also cover the history of slavery in the Unites States and its territories, the Amistad case, civil rights, Winny v. Whitesides, the Missouri Compromise, and the Civil War. Dred Scott v. Sanford forever influenced laws on black citizenship and slavery in the territories. This landmark Supreme Court case changed the course of US history and shaped the country we live in. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Download or read book Slavery the Civil Law and the Supreme Court of Louisiana written by Judith Kelleher Schafer and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the evolution of Louisiana's slave laws from the territorial period to the Civil War, drawing in part on material recently made available by the Louisiana Supreme Court, and appeals involving slaves as plaintiffs, defendants, and objects in lawsuits and criminal actions. Topics include sour
Download or read book The Coming of the Nixon Court written by Earl M. Maltz and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-08-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education and continuing with a series of decisions that, among other things, expanded the reach of the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court that Richard Nixon inherited had presided over a progressive revolution in the law. But by 1972 Nixon had managed to replace four members of the so-called Warren Court with justices more aligned with his own law-and-order conservatism. Nixon's appointees—Warren Burger as Chief Justice and Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist as associate justices—created a politically diverse bench, one that included not only committed progressives and conservatives, but also justices with a wide variety of more moderate views. The addition of the Nixon justices dramatically changed the trajectory of American constitutional jurisprudence with ramifications continuing to this day. This book is an account of the actions of the "Nixon Court" during the 1972 term—a term during which one of the most politically diverse benches of the era would confront a remarkably broad array of issues with major implications for the future of constitutional law. By looking at the term's cases—most notably Roe v. Wade, but also those addressing school desegregation, criminal procedure, obscenity, the rights of the poor, gender discrimination, and aid to parochial schools—Earl Maltz offers a detailed picture of the unique interactions behind each decision. His book provides the reader with a rare close-up view of the complexity of the forces that shape the responses of a politically diverse Court to ideologically divisive issues—responses that, taken together, would shape the evolution of constitutional doctrine for decades to come.
Download or read book The U S Supreme Court and New Federalism written by Christopher P. Banks and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constitutional scholars Christopher P. Banks and John C. Blakeman offer the most current and the first book-length study of the U.S. Supreme Court's "new federalism" begun by the Rehnquist Court and now flourishing under Chief Justice John Roberts. While the Rehnquist Court reinvorgorated new federalism by protecting state sovereignty and set new constitutional limits on federal power, Banks and Blakeman show that in the Roberts Court new federalism continues to evolve in a docket increasingly attentive to statutory construction, preemption, and business litigation
Download or read book The Dred Scott Case written by David Thomas Konig and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law presents original research and the reflections of the nation's leading scholars who gathered in St. Louis to mark the 150th anniversary of what was arguably the most infamous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision, which held that African Americans "had no rights" under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to alter that, galvanized Americans and thrust the issue of race and law to the center of American politics. --
Download or read book The American Supreme Court written by Robert G. McCloskey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixth edition of the classic and concise account of the US Supreme Court, its history, and its place in American politics. For more than fifty years, Robert G. McCloskey’s classic work on the Supreme Court’s role in constructing the US Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation’s highest court. As in prior editions, McCloskey’s original text remains unchanged. In his historical interpretation, he argues that the strength of the Court has always been its sensitivity to the changing political scene, as well as its reluctance to stray too far from the main currents of public sentiment. In this new edition, Sanford Levinson extends McCloskey’s magisterial treatment to address developments since the 2010 election, including the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding the Defense of Marriage Act, the Affordable Care Act, and gay marriage. The best and most concise account of the Supreme Court and its place in American politics, McCloskey’s wonderfully readable book is an essential guide to the past, present, and future prospects of this institution. Praise for The American Supreme Court “The classic account of the American Supreme Court by the mid-twentieth century’s most astute student of American constitutionalism updated by the early twenty-first century’s most astute student of American constitutionalism. This is the first work constitutional beginners should—and constitutional scholars do—turn to.” —Mark Graber, University of Maryland School of Law “Essential. . . . This fifth edition carries on the tradition of earlier iterations, keeping McCloskey’s keen insights, analytical framework, and normative instincts intact. . . . Levinson supplements the original argument with chapters . . . that draw on his remarkable intellectual range and invite readers to continue asking the still-salient questions McCloskey set forth a half-century earlier.” —Choice, on the fifth edition
Download or read book Habeas Corpus in America written by Justin J. Wert and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most Americans, habeas corpus is the cornerstone of our legal system: the principal constitutional check on arbitrary government power, allowing an arrested person to challenge the legality of his detention. In a study that could not be more timely, Justin Wert reexamines this essential individual right and shows that habeas corpus is not necessarily the check that we've assumed. Habeas corpus, it emerges, is as much a tool of politics as it is of law. In this first study of habeas corpus in an American political context, Wert shifts our collective emphasis from the judicial to the political-toward the changes in the writ influenced by Congress, the president, political parties, state governments, legal academics, and even interest groups. By doing so, he reveals how political regimes have used habeas corpus both to undo the legacies of their predecessors and to establish and enforce their own vision of constitutional governance. Tracing the history of the writ from the Founding to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush, Wert illuminates crucial developmental moments in its evolution. He demonstrates that during the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Great Society, and the ongoing war on terrorism, habeas corpus has waxed and waned in harmony with the interests of majoritarian politics. Along the way, Wert identifies and explains the political context of fine points of law that many political scientists and historians may not be aware of—such as the exhaustion rule requiring that a federal habeas participant must first exhaust all possible claims for relief in state court, a maneuver by which the post-Reconstruction Court abandoned supervision of race relations in the South. Especially in light of the new scrutiny of habeas corpus prompted by the Guantánamo detainees, Wert's book is essential for broadening our understanding of how law and politics continue to intersect after 9/11. Brimming with fresh insights into constitutional development and regime theory, it shows that the Great Writ of Liberty may not be so great as we have supposed-because while it has the potential to enforce conceptions of rights that are consistent with the best ideals of American politics, it also has the potential to enforce its worst aspects as well.
Download or read book The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War written by Michael F. Conlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates the crucial role that the Constitution played in the coming of the Civil War.
Download or read book Borderlands of Slavery written by William S. Kiser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borderlands of Slavery explores how the existence of two involuntary labor systems—Mexican peonage and Indian captivity—in the nineteenth-century Southwest impacted the transformation of America's judicial and political institutions during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras.
Download or read book Slavery in the American Republic written by David F. Ericson and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many scholars believe that the existence of slavery stymied the development of the American state because slaveholding Southern politicians were so at odds with a federal government they feared would abolish their peculiar institution. David Ericson argues to the contrary, showing that over a seventy-year period slavery actually contributed significantly to the development of the American state, even as a "house divided." Drawing on deep archival research that tracks federal expenditures on slavery-related items, Ericson reveals how the policies, practices, and institutions of the early national government functioned to protect slavery and thereby contributed to its own development. Here are surprising descriptions of how the federal government increased its state capacities as it implemented slavery-friendly policies, such as creating more stable slave markets by removing Native Americans, deterring slave revolts, recovering fugitive slaves, enacting a ban on slave imports, and not enacting a ban on the interstate slave trade. It also bolstered its own law-enforcement power by reinforcing navy squadrons to interdict illegal slave trading, hiring deputy marshals to capture fugitive slaves and slave rescuers, and deploying soldiers to remove Native Americans and deter slave rescues and revolts. Going beyond Don Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic, Ericson shows how the presence of slavery indirectly influenced the development of the American state in highly significant ways. Enforcement of the 1808 slave-import ban involved the federal government in border control for the first time, and participation in founding a colony in Liberia established an early model of public-private partnerships. The presence of slavery also spurred the development of the U.S. Army through its many slavery-related deployments, particularly during the Second Seminole War, and the federal government's own slave rentals influenced its labor-management practices. Ericson's study unearths a long-neglected history, connecting slavery-influenced policy areas more explicitly to early American state development and more fully accounting for the money and manpower the federal government devoted to those areas. Rich in historical detail, it marks a significant contribution to our understanding of state development and the impact of slavery on early American politics.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the U S Constitution written by Mark V. Tushnet and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 1110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the U.S. Constitution offers a comprehensive overview and introduction to the U.S. Constitution from the perspectives of history, political science, law, rights, and constitutional themes, while focusing on its development, structures, rights, and role in the U.S. political system and culture. This Handbook enables readers within and beyond the U.S. to develop a critical comprehension of the literature on the Constitution, along with accessible and up-to-date analysis. The historical essays included in this Handbook cover the Constitution from 1620 right through the Reagan Revolution to the present. Essays on political science detail how contemporary citizens in the United States rely extensively on political parties, interest groups, and bureaucrats to operate a constitution designed to prevent the rise of parties, interest-group politics and an entrenched bureaucracy. The essays on law explore how contemporary citizens appear to expect and accept the exertions of power by a Supreme Court, whose members are increasingly disconnected from the world of practical politics. Essays on rights discuss how contemporary citizens living in a diverse multi-racial society seek guidance on the meaning of liberty and equality, from a Constitution designed for a society in which all politically relevant persons shared the same race, gender, religion and ethnicity. Lastly, the essays on themes explain how in a globalized world, people living in the United States can continue to be governed by a constitution originally meant for a society geographically separated from the rest of the civilized world. Whether a return to the pristine constitutional institutions of the founding or a translation of these constitutional norms in the present is possible remains the central challenge of U.S. constitutionalism today.
Download or read book University of Chicago Law Review Volume 78 Number 4 Fall 2011 written by University of Chicago Law Review and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2012-04-11 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading law review now offers a quality eBook edition. The fourth and final issue of 2011 (Volume 78) features articles and essays from internationally recognized legal scholars and governmental leaders, including Cass Sunstein (on empirically informed regulation), Jonathan Bressler (on jury nullification and Reconstruction), Daniel Schwarcz (on standardized insurance policies), and Bertral Ross II (writing against constitutional mainstreaming in stautory interpretation). In addition, the issue includes a review essay on the book The Master Switch, as well as student Comments on such subjects as same-sex divorce, religious practices by prisoners, falsely claiming Medal of Honor status, and enhancement in federal sentencing. The issue is presented in modern eBook formatting and features active Tables of Contents; linked footnotes and URLs; and legible graphs and tables.
Download or read book Prigg v Pennsylvania written by H. Robert Baker and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Morgan was born in freedom's shadow. Her parents were slaves of John Ashmore, a prosperous Maryland mill owner who freed many of his slaves in the last years of his life. Ashmore never laid claim to Margaret, who eventually married a free black man and moved to Pennsylvania. Then, John Ashmore's widow sent Edward Prigg to Pennsylvania to claim Margaret as a runaway. Prigg seized Margaret and her children-one of them born in Pennsylvania-and forcibly removed them to Maryland in violation of Pennsylvania law. In the ensuing uproar, Prigg was indicted for kidnapping under Pennsylvania's personal liberty law. Maryland, however, blocked his extradition, setting the stage for a remarkable Supreme Court case in 1842. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court considered more than just the fate of a single slavecatcher. The Court's majority struck down the free states' personal liberty laws and reaffirmed federal supremacy in determining the procedures for fugitive slave rendition. H. Robert Baker has written the first and only book-length treatment of this landmark case that became a pivot point for antebellum politics and law some fifteen years before Dred Scott. Baker addresses the Constitution's ambivalence regarding slavery and freedom. At issue were the reach of slaveholders' property rights into the free states, the rights of free blacks, and the relative powers of the federal and state governments. By announcing federal supremacy in regulating fugitive slave rendition, Prigg v. Pennsylvania was meant to bolster what slaveholders claimed as a constitutional right. But the decision cast into doubt the ability of free states to define freedom and to protect their free black populations from kidnapping. Baker's eye-opening account raises crucial questions about the place of slavery in the Constitution and the role of the courts in protecting it in antebellum America. More than that, it demonstrates how judges fashion conflicting constitutional interpretations from the same sources of law. Ultimately, it offers an instructive look at how constitutional interpretation that claims to be faithful to neutral legal principles and a definitive original meaning is nonetheless freighted with contemporary politics and morality. Prigg v. Pennsylvania is a sobering lesson for those concerned with today's controversial issues, as states seek to supplement and preempt federal immigration law or to overturn Roe v. Wade.
