Download or read book The Interbellum Constitution written by Alison L. LaCroix and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-28 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity. The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles--commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity--concerned what we now call "federalism," meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today's constitutional debates admit. As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model--a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.
Download or read book How Constitutional Rights Matter written by Adam S. Chilton and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do countries that add rights to their constitutions actually do better at protecting those rights? This study draws on global statistical analyses and survey experiments to answer this question. It explores whether constitutionalizing rights improves respect for those rights in practice.
Download or read book The Ideological Origins of American Federalism written by Alison L. LaCroix and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue.
Download or read book Cannons and Codes written by Alison L. LaCroix and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume on war in law and literature addresses the many ways in which war affects human society and the many groups of people whose lives are affected by war. The essays, by preeminent scholars, discuss the ways in which literary works can shed light on legal thinking about war, and how a deep understanding of law can lead to interpretive insights on literary works. Some concern the lives of soldiers; others focus on civilians living in war zones, whoare caught up in the conflict; still others address themselves to the home front, far from the theatre of war. By collecting such diverse perspectives, with contributions from preeminent scholars of philosophy, literature, and law, this volume aims to show how literature has reflected the totalizingnature of war and the ways in which it distorts law across domains.
Download or read book Taking Back the Constitution written by Mark Tushnet and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the Supreme Court’s move to the right has distorted both logic and the Constitution What Supreme Court justices do is far more than just “calling balls and strikes.” The Court has never simply evaluated laws and arguments in light of permanent and immutable constitutional meanings. Social, moral, and yes, political ideas have always played into the justices’ impressions of how they think a case should be decided. Mark Tushnet traces the ways constitutional thought has evolved, from the liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society to the Reagan conservatism that has been dominant since the 1980s. Looking at the current crossroads in the constitutional order, Tushnet explores the possibilities of either a Trumpian entrenchment of the most extreme ideas of the Reagan philosophy, or a dramatic and destabilizing move to the left. Wary of either outcome, he offers a passionate and informed argument for replacing judicial supremacy with popular constitutionalism—a move that would restore to the other branches of government a role in deciding constitutional questions.
Download or read book Constitutional Sentiments written by András Sajó and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constitutional Sentiments provides new insights into the foundations of law, the complexities of legal institutions, and the hidden genealogies of lawmaking. As the book makes clear, constitutions are human creations that embody all aspects of our humanity. It is an example of serious scholarship that will attract readers of all disciplines who have a keen interest in social and political life. --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Imperial from the Beginning written by Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent scholar Saikrishna Prakash offers the first truly comprehensive study of the original American presidency. Drawing from a vast range of sources both well known and obscure, this volume reconstructs the powers and duties of the nation's chief executive at the Constitution's founding. Among other subjects, Prakash examines the term and structure of the office of the president, as well as the president's power as constitutional executor of the law, authority in foreign policy, role as commander in chief, level of control during emergencies, and relationship with the Congress, the courts, and the states. This ambitious and even-handed analysis counters numerous misconceptions about the presidency and fairly demonstrates that the office was seen as monarchical from its inception.
Download or read book A Republic of Statutes written by William N. Eskridge (Jr.) and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Eskridge and John Ferejohn propose an original theory of constitutional law whereby, while the Constitution provides a vision, our democracy advances by means of statutes that supplement or even supplant the written Constitution.
Download or read book Fatal Fictions written by Alison L. LaCroix and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.
Download or read book Subversion and Sympathy written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Subversion and Sympathy : Gender, Law, and the British Novel brings new energy and perspective to the law-and-literature movement. Focusing on the position of women in British novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - a period during which literature played a creative role in legal reform - the book illustrates the many ways in which the investigation of legal matters sheds new light on major literary works. At the same time, it shows that attention to literary representations of legal issues illuminates developments in the law by bringing to life matters at stake in legal reforms. In fourteen essays, the volume spans a range of gender-related issues, including inheritance, money lending, illegitimacy, marriage, and rape. At the same time, it makes a methodological contribution, displaying (and discussing) a range of perspectives that exemplifies the breadth and range of this interdisciplinary area of scholarship, which links history, gender studies, philosophy, literary studies, and law. The volume seeks to reinvigorate the methodology of the law-and-literature movement by provoking a cross-disciplinary conversation among legal scholars, judges, literary scholars, and feminist philosophers. Participants include those already known for their work on law and literature but also, crucially, legal leading lights who have not previously written about literature. Subversion and Sympathy shows that the conversation between law and literature can enrich our understanding not just of the fields in question but also of the deeper human issues at the heart of a given period - and beyond"--Unedited summary from book jacket.
Download or read book Free Speech on Campus written by Erwin Chemerinsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can free speech coexist with an inclusive campus environment? Hardly a week goes by without another controversy over free speech on college campuses. On one side, there are increased demands to censor hateful, disrespectful, and bullying expression and to ensure an inclusive and nondiscriminatory learning environment. On the other side are traditional free speech advocates who charge that recent demands for censorship coddle students and threaten free inquiry. In this clear and carefully reasoned book, a university chancellor and a law school dean—both constitutional scholars who teach a course in free speech to undergraduates—argue that campuses must provide supportive learning environments for an increasingly diverse student body but can never restrict the expression of ideas. This book provides the background necessary to understanding the importance of free speech on campus and offers clear prescriptions for what colleges can and can’t do when dealing with free speech controversies.
Download or read book The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution written by Simon J. Gilhooley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhooley traces how debates around the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia gave rise to the articulation of this constitutional interpretation, which constrained the radical potential of the constitutional text. To reconstruct the origins of this interpretation, Gilhooley draws on rich sources that include historical newspapers, pamphlets, and congressional debates. Examining free black activism in the North, Abolitionism in the 1830s, and the evolution of pro-slavery thought, this book shows how in navigating the existence of slavery in the District and the fundamental constitutional issue of the enslaved's personhood, Antebellum opponents of abolition came to promote an enduring but constraining constitutional imaginary.
Download or read book Private Property and the Constitution written by Bruce Ackerman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1977-01-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proper construction of the compensation clause of the Constitution has emerged as the central legal issue of the environmental revolution, as property owners have challenged a steady stream of environmental statutes that have cut deeply into traditional notions of property rights. When may they justly demand that the state compensate them for the sacrifices they are called upon to make for the common good? Ackerman argues that there is more at stake in the present wave of litigation than even the future shape of environmental law in the United States. To frame an adequate response, lawyers must come to terms with an analytic conflict that implicates the nature of modern legal thought itself. Ackerman expresses this conflict in terms of two opposed ideal types---Scientific Policymaking and Ordinary Observing---and sketches the very different way in which these competing approaches understand the compensation question. He also tries to demonstrate that the confusion of current compensation doctrine is a product of the legal profession's failure to choose between these two modes of legal analysis.He concludes by exploring the large implications of such a choice---relating the conflict between Scientific Policymaking and Ordinary Observing to fundamental issues in economic analysis, political theory, metaethics, and the philosophy of language.
Download or read book Creating the Administrative Constitution written by Jerry L. Mashaw and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book is the first to look at administration and administrative law in the earliest days of the American republic. Contrary to conventional understandings, Mashaw demonstrates that from the very beginning Congress delegated vast discretion to administrative officials and armed them with extrajudicial adjudicatory, rulemaking, and enforcement authority. The legislative and administrative practices of the U.S. Constitution’s first century created an administrative constitution hardly hinted at in its formal text. Beyond describing a history that has previously gone largely unexamined, this book, in the author’s words, will "demonstrate that there has been no precipitous fall from a historical position of separation-of-powers grace to a position of compromise; there is not a new administrative constitution whose legitimacy should be understood as not only contestable but deeply problematic."
Download or read book Corporations Are People Too written by Kent Greenfield and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why we’re better off treating corporations as people under the law—and making them behave like citizens Are corporations people? The U.S. Supreme Court launched a heated debate when it ruled in Citizens United that corporations can claim the same free speech rights as humans. Should corporations be able to claim rights of free speech, religious conscience, and due process? Kent Greenfield provides an answer: Sometimes. With an analysis sure to challenge the assumptions of both progressives and conservatives, Greenfield explores corporations' claims to constitutional rights and the foundational conflicts about their obligations in society. He argues that a blanket opposition to corporate personhood is misguided, since it is consistent with both the purpose of corporations and the Constitution itself that corporations can claim rights at least some of the time. The problem with Citizens United is not that corporations have a right to speak, but for whom they speak. The solution is not to end corporate personhood but to require corporations to act more like citizens.
Download or read book The Second Creation written by Jonathan Gienapp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront anew the question that animated the founders so long ago: What is our Constitution? Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the Founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation. When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American Constitution a written text, or something else? Was it a legal text? Was it finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they confronted the document’s uncertainty, and—over time—how these leaders imagined the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve, an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.
Download or read book Personalized Law written by Omri Ben-Shahar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. "Personalized Law"---rules that vary person by person---will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. "Reasonable person" standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own "reasonable you" rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. In this book, Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat not only present this concept in a clear, easily accessible way, but they offer specific examples of how personalized law may be implemented across a variety of real-life applications.
