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Author: Jason Pierceson
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 9781592134021
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUnderstanding approaches to liberalism through the study of the politics of gay and lesbian rights.
Author: Ian Millhiser
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Published: 2016-06-28
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 1568585853
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNow with a new epilogue-- an unprecedented and unwavering history of the Supreme Court showing how its decisions have consistently favored the moneyed and powerful. Few American institutions have inflicted greater suffering on ordinary people than the Supreme Court of the United States. Since its inception, the justices of the Supreme Court have shaped a nation where children toiled in coal mines, where Americans could be forced into camps because of their race, and where a woman could be sterilized against her will by state law. The Court was the midwife of Jim Crow, the right hand of union busters, and the dead hand of the Confederacy. Nor is the modern Court a vast improvement, with its incursions on voting rights and its willingness to place elections for sale. In this powerful indictment of a venerated institution, Ian Millhiser tells the history of the Supreme Court through the eyes of the everyday people who have suffered the most from it. America ratified three constitutional amendments to provide equal rights to freed slaves, but the justices spent thirty years largely dismantling these amendments. Then they spent the next forty years rewriting them into a shield for the wealthy and the powerful. In the Warren era and the few years following it, progressive justices restored the Constitution's promises of equality, free speech, and fair justice for the accused. But, Millhiser contends, that was an historic accident. Indeed, if it weren't for several unpredictable events, Brown v. Board of Education could have gone the other way. In Injustices, Millhiser argues that the Supreme Court has seized power for itself that rightfully belongs to the people's elected representatives, and has bent the arc of American history away from justice.
Author: Kevin J. McMahon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-09-19
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 0226561216
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMost analysts have deemed Richard Nixon’s challenge to the judicial liberalism of the Warren Supreme Court a failure—“a counterrevolution that wasn’t.” Nixon’s Court offers an alternative assessment. Kevin J. McMahon reveals a Nixon whose public rhetoric was more conservative than his administration’s actions and whose policy towards the Court was more subtle than previously recognized. Viewing Nixon’s judicial strategy as part political and part legal, McMahon argues that Nixon succeeded substantially on both counts. Many of the issues dear to social conservatives, such as abortion and school prayer, were not nearly as important to Nixon. Consequently, his nominations for the Supreme Court were chosen primarily to advance his “law and order” and school desegregation agendas—agendas the Court eventually endorsed. But there were also political motivations to Nixon’s approach: he wanted his judicial policy to be conservative enough to attract white southerners and northern white ethnics disgruntled with the Democratic party but not so conservative as to drive away moderates in his own party. In essence, then, he used his criticisms of the Court to speak to members of his “Silent Majority” in hopes of disrupting the long-dominant New Deal Democratic coalition. For McMahon, Nixon’s judicial strategy succeeded not only in shaping the course of constitutional law in the areas he most desired but also in laying the foundation of an electoral alliance that would dominate presidential politics for a generation.
Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1998-08-11
Total Pages: 388
ISBN-13: 9780300076479
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLegal scholarship is in a state of crisis, Laura Kalman argues in this history of the most prestigious field in law studies: constitutional theory. Since the time of the New Deal, says Kalman, most law scholars have identified themselves as liberals who believe in the power of the Supreme Court to effect progressive social change. In recent years, however, new political and interdisciplinary perspectives have undermined the tenets of legal liberalism, and liberal law professors have enlisted other disciplines in the attempt to legitimize their beliefs. Such prominent legal thinkers as Cass Sunstein, Bruce Ackerman, and Frank Michelman have incorporated the work of historians into their legal theories and arguments, turning to eighteenth-century republicanism--which stressed communal values and an active citizenry--to justify their goals. Kalman, a historian and a lawyer, suggests that reliance on history in legal thinking makes sense at a time when the Supreme Court repeatedly declares that it will protect only those liberties rooted in history and tradition. There are pitfalls in interdisciplinary argumentation, she cautions, for historians' reactions to this use of their work have been unenthusiastic and even hostile. Yet lawyers, law professors, and historians have cooperated in some recent Supreme Court cases, and Kalman concludes with a practical examination of the ways they can work together more effectively as social activists.
Author: Michael W. Dowdle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-01-26
Total Pages: 375
ISBN-13: 1316943089
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConstitutionalism beyond Liberalism bridges the gap between comparative constitutional law and constitutional theory. The volume uses the constitutional experience of countries in the global South - China, India, South Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia - to transcend the liberal conceptions of constitutionalism that currently dominate contemporary comparative constitutional discourse. The alternative conceptions examined include political constitutionalism, societal constitutionalism, state-based (Rousseau-ian) conceptions of constitutionalism, and geopolitical conceptions of constitutionalism. Through these examinations, the volume seeks to expand our appreciation of the human possibilities of constitutionalism, exploring constitutionalism not merely as a restriction on the powers of government, but also as a creating collective political and social possibilities in diverse geographical and historical settings.
Author: Richard A. Epstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2014-01-06
Total Pages: 889
ISBN-13: 0674727800
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican liberals and conservatives alike take for granted a progressive view of the Constitution that took root in the early twentieth century. Richard Epstein laments this complacency which, he believes, explains America’s current economic malaise and political gridlock. Steering clear of well-worn debates between defenders of originalism and proponents of a living Constitution, Epstein employs close textual reading, historical analysis, and political and economic theory to urge a return to the classical liberal theory of governance that animated the framers’ original text, and to the limited government this theory supports. “[An] important and learned book.” —Gary L. McDowell, Times Literary Supplement “Epstein has now produced a full-scale and full-throated defense of his unusual vision of the Constitution. This book is his magnum opus...Much of his book consists of comprehensive and exceptionally detailed accounts of how constitutional provisions ought to be understood...All of Epstein’s particular discussions are instructive, and most of them are provocative...Epstein has written a passionate, learned, and committed book.” —Cass R. Sunstein, New Republic
Author: Jack M. Balkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0197530990
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"America's constitutional system evolves through the interplay between three cycles: the rise and fall of dominant political parties, the waxing and waning of political polarization, and alternating episodes of constitutional rot and constitutional renewal. America's politics seems especially fraught today because we are nearing the end of the Republican Party's long political dominance, at the height of a long cycle of political polarization, and suffering from an advanced case of "constitutional rot." Constitutional rot is the historical process through which republics become increasingly less representative and less devoted to the common good. Caused by increasing economic inequality and loss of trust, constitutional rot seriously threatens the constitutional system. But America has been through these cycles before, and will get through them again. America is in a Second Gilded Age slowly moving toward a second Progressive Era, during which polarization will eventually recede. The same cycles shape the work of the federal courts and theories about constitutional interpretation. They explain why political parties have switched sides on judicial review not once but twice in the twentieth century. Polarization and constitutional rot alter the political supports for judicial review, make fights over judicial appointments especially bitter, and encourage constitutional hardball. The Constitution ordinarily relies on the judiciary to protect democracy and to prevent political corruption and self-entrenching behavior. But when constitutional rot is advanced, the Supreme Court is likely to be ineffective and may even make matters worse. Courts cannot save the country from constitutional rot; only political mobilization can"--
Author: Richard M. Valelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-09-15
Total Pages: 898
ISBN-13: 0191086983
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance? Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.
Author: Robert Alexy
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 518
ISBN-13: 0199584230
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn any country where there is a Bill of Rights, constitutional rights reasoning is an important part of the legal process. As more and more countries adopt Human Rights legislation and accede to international human rights agreements, and as the European Union introduces its own Bill of Rights, judges struggle to implement these rights consistently and sometimes the reasoning behind them is lost. Examining the practice in other jurisdictions can be a valuable guide. Robert Alexy's classic work reconstructs the reasoning behind the jurisprudence of the German Basic Law and in doing so provides a theory of general application to all jurisdictions where judges wrestle with rights adjudication. In considering the features of constitutional rights reasoning, the author moves from the doctrine of proportionality, procedural rights and the structure and scope of constitutional rights, to general rights of liberty and equality and the problem of horizontal effect. A postscript written for the English edition considers critiques of the Theory since it first appeared in 1985, focusing in particular on the discretion left to legislatures and in an extended introduction the translator argues that the theory may be used to clarify the nature of legal reasoning in the context of rights under the British Constitution.
Author: Thomas M. Keck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-02-15
Total Pages: 394
ISBN-13: 0226428869
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen conservatives took control of the federal judiciary in the 1980s, it was widely assumed that they would reverse the landmark rights-protecting precedents set by the Warren Court and replace them with a broad commitment to judicial restraint. Instead, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist has reaffirmed most of those liberal decisions while creating its own brand of conservative judicial activism. Ranging from 1937 to the present, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History traces the legal and political forces that have shaped the modern Court. Thomas M. Keck argues that the tensions within modern conservatism have produced a court that exercises its own power quite actively, on behalf of both liberal and conservative ends. Despite the long-standing conservative commitment to restraint, the justices of the Rehnquist Court have stepped in to settle divisive political conflicts over abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, presidential elections, and much more. Keck focuses in particular on the role of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, whose deciding votes have shaped this uncharacteristically activist Court.
