Cultural history and themendment : New York Times v. Sullivan and its times / Kermit L. Hall -- New directions in American constitutional history -- Words as hard as cannon-balls : women's rights agitation -- And liberty of speech in nineteenth-century America / Sandra F. VanBurkleo -- Race, state, market, and civil society in constitutional history / Mark Tushnet -- Constitutional history and the "cultural turn" : cross -- Examining the legal-reelist narratives of Henry Fonda / Norman L. Rosenberg -- Contributors
This volume investigates the nature of constitutional democratic government in the United States and elsewhere. It provides comprehensive tools for analyzing and comparing different forms of constitutional democracy. The collection will be of interest to students and readers in political science, law, history and political philosophy.
Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.
Despite decades of nation-building exercise, ethnic-based claims for substantive equality, justice and equitable political inclusion and socio-economic order continue to result in communal rivalries. These are claims that define and represent the issue of minorities in Africa, of which these conflicts are manifestations. Although ethnic conflicts in Africa have been a subject of a large number of studies, the potential and role of norms on minority rights to address claims that ethno-cultural groups raise has not received the attention it deserves. Based on materials from normative political theory and international human rights law and using an empirical and prescriptive analysis, this book defends a robust system of minority rights built around culture, equality and self-determination. This is employed to elaborate an adequate constitutional design providing policy frameworks (multilingual language policy, recognition and affirmation of cultural diversity,), structures (that ensure just representation and participation of members of all groups) and norms (that guarantee substantive equality and the rights to language, religion and culture). The study then proffers two cases studies (South Africa and Ethiopia) to ascertain how such constitutional design might be translated into actual policy frameworks, institutions and norms.
This book examines China’s striving for a constitutional order in the 20th century from comparative, historical, and theoretical perspectives. Through a comprehensive study of six major constitutional reforms experienced by China in the last century, Shiping Hua explores pragmatism, instrumentalism, statism, and favoritism as the key features of the Chinese legal culture. Demonstrating that these characteristics have roots in China’s ancient past and coincide with modern communist legal theory, it argues that Chinese legal culture has greatly impacted upon the country’s move to modernize its legal system. By analyzing key constitutional periods in China’s history, this book also evaluates patterns that can be used to better comprehend not only China’s present legal reform but its future legal developments too. As the first book to examine how the Chinese legal culture has affected constitutional reform in the 20th century, Chinese Legal Culture and Constitutional Order will be useful to students and scholars of Asian and constitutional law, as well as Chinese Studies more generally. Winner of the 2019 ACPSS (Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences in the United States) Best Scholarly Publication Award for Original Research.
ÔA fascinating collection of essays commenting on and developing FrankenbergÕs IKEA theory of legal transfer. With valuable theoretical analyses, comparative studies, attention to gender issues, post-colonial contexts, imposed law and legal history, this book is essential reading for anyone thinking about the circulation of legal models especially, but not only, in the area of constitutional law.Õ Ð David Nelken, University of Cardiff, UK ÔFrankenbergÕs work gives a new insight of what comparative law can be in the context of globalization, representing an outstanding achievement. His theory of ÒtransferÓ supersedes the metaphors of mainstream scholarship, displaying that constitutions are not mere ÒcommoditiesÓ or items to be assembled. The real matter is rather, which ÒmeaningsÓ are generated through transfer. In this way, beyond any usual flat version, we may perceive that any Òconstitutional relocationÓ exhibits a reappraisal of the whole world we live in.Õ Ð Pier Giueseppe Monateri, University of Turin, Italy Constitutional orders and legal regimes are established and changed through the importing and exporting of ideas and ideologies, norms, institutions and arguments. The contributions in this book discuss this assumption and address theoretical questions, methodological problems and political projects connected with the transfer of constitutions and law. Some of the chapters focus on the pathways, risks and side-effects of legal-constitutional transfers in specific situations, such as postcolonial societies and occupied territories. Others follow law beyond the official arenas into systems of legal pluralism, while others analyze how experimentalism generates hybrid constitutional orders. This interdisciplinary, multi-jurisdictional study will appeal to researchers, academics and advanced students in the fields of comparative constitutional law, comparative law and legal theory.
Written constitutions are an important attribute of nation states and have become a global phenomenon over the past 200 years. The process began with the revolutions in the Atlantic World, from where it spread to other regions. The present volume looks into the complex of constitutions, the fundamental values conveyed by the constitutional texts, the building and functioning of new constitutional bodies and their symbolic representation. All the authors work on the assumption that in order to fully understand the constitutional order and its history, it is necessary, in addition to studying the legal text, to analyse its special forms of implementation and legitimisation. Therefore, culture is seen as an important component of constitutional history. The volume brings together historians from Argentina, France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and the United States; all are specialised in constitutional history and political culture in the 19th century. Their contributions include case studies on the colonial European powers as well as their colonies or ex-colonies in the Americas. A special aim of the volume is to show the connectedness of the constitutional processes that took place in these regions during the late 18th and the 19th centuries. By connecting two vibrant research areas, this volume makes an important contribution to studies on political culture and the history of the Atlantic World. The book targets a broad academic readership, especially in the fields of cultural studies, history, and political science, and contributes to an internationalisation of the academic debate on the concept of constitutional culture.
Few Americans understand the Constitution’s workings. Its real importance for the average citizen is as an enduring reminder of the moral vision that shaped the nation's founding. Maxwell Bloomfield looks at the broader appeal that constitutional idealism has always made to the American imagination through publications and films.
