Constitutional Law
Constitutional Law

Author: William D. Araiza

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781611637298

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To view or download the 2020 Supplement to this book click here. Constitutional Law: Cases, Approaches, and Applications is a succinct and careful presentation of canonical constitutional law cases and important constitutional law statements from the political branches. Additionally, its annual supplement includes material based on recent appellate cases applying Supreme Court constitutional doctrine. Its main features include: Relatively longer excerpts of relatively fewer cases, carefully edited to preserve citations to relevant precedent. This feature allows professors to engage students about appropriate use of precedent. The book also includes note material that connects the featured cases, thus providing the students with a comprehensive explanation of the law in a manageable number of pages. Thematic, as well as topical, organization, which allows professors to explore particular jurisprudential approaches. For example, much of the equal protection material is organized around the Court's use, and eventual abandonment, of suspect class analysis. An annual supplement that, in addition to excerpting the Supreme Court's most recent constitutional law opinions, also features appellate cases applying the Court's constitutional law doctrines, in the form of excerpts, notes, or problems. This feature helps students understand how the Court's often-vague statements of constitutional law are actually applied. It also teaches the fundamental (but often-unlearned) reality that practicing lawyers need to know not just what the Supreme Court has said about a particular issue, but how the relevant lower court jurisdiction has understood that statement. Moreover, providing these cases as problems allows students to work through the implications of a Supreme Court decision in a concrete, real-life context.

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Author: Maya Schenwar

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2016-05-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1608466841

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Essays and reports examining the reality of police violence against Black and brown communities in America. What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young Black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays (the first collaboration between Truthout and Haymarket Books) explores police violence against Black, brown, indigenous, and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police. Contributions cover a broad range of issues including the killing by police of Black men and women, police violence against Latino and indigenous communities, law enforcement’s treatment of pregnant people and those with mental illness, and the impact of racist police violence on parenting. There are also specific stories such as a Detroit police conspiracy to slap murder convictions on young Black men using police informant, and the failure of Chicago’s much-touted Independent Police Review Authority, the body supposedly responsible for investigating police misconduct. The title Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is no mere provocation: the book also explores alternatives for keeping communities safe. Contributors include William C. Anderson, Candice Bernd, Aaron Cantú, Thandi Chimurenga, Ejeris Dixon, Adam Hudson, Victoria Law, Mike Ludwig, Sarah Macaraeg, and Roberto Rodriguez. Praise for Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? “With heartbreaking, glass-sharp prose, the book catalogs the abuse and destruction of Black, native, and trans bodies. And then, most importantly, it offers real-world solutions.” —Chicago Review of Books “A must-read for anyone seeking to understand American culture in the present day.” —Xica Nation “This brilliant collection of essays, written by activists, journalists, community organizers and survivors of state violence, urgently confronts the criminalization, police violence and anti-Black racism that is plaguing urban communities. It is one of the most important books to emerge about these critical issues: passionately written with a keen eye towards building a world free of the cruelty and violence of the carceral state.” —Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation

The Sit-Ins
The Sit-Ins

Author: Christopher W. Schmidt

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-03-13

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 022652258X

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On February 1, 1960, four African American college students entered the Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the lunch counter. This lunch counter, like most in the American South, refused to serve black customers. The four students remained in their seats until the store closed. In the following days, they returned, joined by growing numbers of fellow students. These “sit-in” demonstrations soon spread to other southern cities, drawing in thousands of students and coalescing into a protest movement that would transform the struggle for racial equality. The Sit-Ins tells the story of the student lunch counter protests and the national debate they sparked over the meaning of the constitutional right of all Americans to equal protection of the law. Christopher W. Schmidt describes how behind the now-iconic scenes of African American college students sitting in quiet defiance at “whites only” lunch counters lies a series of underappreciated legal dilemmas—about the meaning of the Constitution, the capacity of legal institutions to remedy different forms of injustice, and the relationship between legal reform and social change. The students’ actions initiated a national conversation over whether the Constitution’s equal protection clause extended to the activities of private businesses that served the general public. The courts, the traditional focal point for accounts of constitutional disputes, played an important but ultimately secondary role in this story. The great victory of the sit-in movement came not in the Supreme Court, but in Congress, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, landmark legislation that recognized the right African American students had claimed for themselves four years earlier. The Sit-Ins invites a broader understanding of how Americans contest and construct the meaning of their Constitution.

Is Administrative Law Unlawful?
Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Author: Philip Hamburger

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13: 022611645X

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“Hamburger argues persuasively that America has overlaid its constitutional system with a form of governance that is both alien and dangerous.” —Law and Politics Book Review While the federal government traditionally could constrain liberty only through acts of Congress and the courts, the executive branch has increasingly come to control Americans through its own administrative rules and adjudication, thus raising disturbing questions about the effect of this sort of state power on American government and society. With Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, Philip Hamburger answers this question in the affirmative, offering a revisionist account of administrative law. Rather than accepting it as a novel power necessitated by modern society, he locates its origins in the medieval and early modern English tradition of royal prerogative. Then he traces resistance to administrative law from the Middle Ages to the present. Medieval parliaments periodically tried to confine the Crown to governing through regular law, but the most effective response was the seventeenth-century development of English constitutional law, which concluded that the government could rule only through the law of the land and the courts, not through administrative edicts. Although the US Constitution pursued this conclusion even more vigorously, administrative power reemerged in the Progressive and New Deal Eras. Since then, Hamburger argues, administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution—and constitutions in general—were designed to prevent. With a clear yet many-layered argument that draws on history, law, and legal thought, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? reveals administrative law to be not a benign, natural outgrowth of contemporary government but a pernicious—and profoundly unlawful—return to dangerous pre-constitutional absolutism.

Race, Law, and American Society
Race, Law, and American Society

Author: Gloria J. Browne-Marshall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1135087946

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This second edition of Gloria Browne-Marshall’s seminal work , tracing the history of racial discrimination in American law from colonial times to the present, is now available with major revisions. Throughout, she advocates for freedom and equality at the center, moving from their struggle for physical freedom in the slavery era to more recent battles for equal rights and economic equality. From the colonial period to the present, this book examines education, property ownership, voting rights, criminal justice, and the military as well as internationalism and civil liberties by analyzing the key court cases that established America’s racial system and demonstrating the impact of these court cases on American society. This edition also includes more on Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos. Race, Law, and American Society is highly accessible and thorough in its depiction of the role race has played, with the sanction of the U.S. Supreme Court, in shaping virtually every major American social institution.

The Positive Second Amendment
The Positive Second Amendment

Author: Joseph Blocher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-09-13

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1107158699

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Provides the first comprehensive post-Heller account of the Second Amendment as constitutional law - dispelling many myths along the way.

The Constitution as Political Structure
The Constitution as Political Structure

Author: Martin H. Redish

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0195070607

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Over the last forty years modern constitutional scholarship has concentrated on an analysis of rights, while principles of constitutional law concerning the structure of government have been largely down-played. The irony of this interpretive emphasis is that the body of the Constitution contains relatively little dealing directly with rights. Rather, it is primarily a blueprint for the establishment of a complex form of federal-democratic structure. The Constitution as Political Structure emphasizes the central role served by the structural portions of the Constitution. Redish argues that these structural values were designed to provide the framework in which our rights-based system may flourish, and that judicial abandonment of these structural values threatens the very foundations of American political theory. In its exposition of the textual and theoretical rationales for judicial enforcement of the structural values embodied in the Constitution, this book presents a principled alternative to the extremes of judicial abdication articulated by certain scholars and Justices on the one hand, and the result-oriented ideological involvement advocated in some quarters on the other. This work will be of great interest to scholars of law and political science.

Power Without Responsibility
Power Without Responsibility

Author: David Schoenbrod

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0300159595

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This book argues that Congress's process for making law is as corrosive to the nation as unchecked deficit spending. David Schoenbrod shows that Congress and the president, instead of making the laws that govern us, generally give bureaucrats the power to make laws through agency regulations. Our elected "lawmakers" then take credit for proclaiming popular but inconsistent statutory goals and later blame the inevitable burdens and disappointments on the unelected bureaucrats. The 1970 Clean Air Act, for example, gave the Environmental Protection Agency the impossible task of making law that would satisfy both industry and environmentalists. Delegation allows Congress and the president to wield power by pressuring agency lawmakers in private, but shed responsibility by avoiding the need to personally support or oppose the laws, as they must in enacting laws themselves. Schoenbrod draws on his experience as an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and on studies of how delegation actually works to show that this practice produces a regulatory system so cumbersome that it cannot provide the protection that people need, so large that it needlessly stifles the economy, and so complex that it keeps the voters from knowing whom to hold accountable for the consequences. Contending that delegation is unnecessary and unconstitutional, Schoenbrod has written the first book that shows how, as a practical matter, delegation can be stopped.

The Taming of Free Speech
The Taming of Free Speech

Author: Laura Weinrib

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-10-10

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0674545710

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, business leaders condemned civil liberties as masks for subversive activity, while labor sympathizers denounced the courts as shills for industrial interests. But by the Second World War, prominent figures in both camps celebrated the judiciary for protecting freedom of speech. In this strikingly original history, Laura Weinrib illustrates how a surprising coalition of lawyers and activists made judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights a defining feature of American democracy. The Taming of Free Speech traces our understanding of civil liberties to conflict between 1910 and 1940 over workers’ right to strike. As self-proclaimed partisans in the class war, the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union promoted a bold vision of free speech that encompassed unrestricted picketing and boycotts. Over time, however, they subdued their rhetoric to attract adherents and prevail in court. At the height of the New Deal, many liberals opposed the ACLU’s litigation strategy, fearing it would legitimize a judiciary they deemed too friendly to corporations and too hostile to the administrative state. Conversely, conservatives eager to insulate industry from government regulation pivoted to embrace civil liberties, despite their radical roots. The resulting transformation in constitutional jurisprudence—often understood as a triumph for the Left—was in fact a calculated bargain. America’s civil liberties compromise saved the courts from New Deal attack and secured free speech for labor radicals and businesses alike. Ever since, competing groups have clashed in the arena of ideas, shielded by the First Amendment.

Animus
Animus

Author: William D. Araiza

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-04-04

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1479848808

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An introduction to the legal concept of unconstitutional bias. If a town council denies a zoning permit for a group home for intellectually disabled persons because residents don’t want “those kinds of people” in the neighborhood, the town’s decision is motivated by the public’s dislike of a particular group. Constitutional law calls this rationale “animus.” Over the last two decades, the Supreme Court has increasingly turned to the concept of animus to explain why some instances of discrimination are unconstitutional. However, the Court’s condemnation of animus fails to address some serious questions. How can animus on the part of people and institutions be uncovered? Does mere opposition to a particular group’s equality claims constitute animus? Does the concept of animus have roots in the Constitution? Animus engages these important questions, offering an original and provocative introduction to this type of unconstitutional bias. William Araiza analyzes some of the modern Supreme Court’s most important discrimination cases through the lens of animus, tracing the concept from nineteenth century legal doctrine to today’s landmark cases, including Obergefell vs. Hodges and United States v. Windsor, both related to the legal rights of same-sex couples. Animus humanizes what might otherwise be an abstract legal question, illustrating what constitutes animus, and why the prohibition against it matters more today than ever in our pluralistic society.