Chief
Author: Ronald M. George
Publisher: Berkeley Public Policy Press
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 848
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Based upon oral history interviews conducted by Laura McCreery, California Supreme Court Oral History Project."
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Uncertain Justice
Author: Laurence Tribe
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2014-06-03
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 0805099093
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn assessment of how the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is significantly influencing the nation's laws and reinterpreting the Constitution includes in-depth analysis of recent rulings and their implications.
The Pursuit of Justice
Author: Kermit L. Hall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006-12
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0195311892
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReviews and discusses landmark cases heard by the United States Supreme court from 1803 through 2000.
Keeping Faith with the Constitution
Author: Goodwin Liu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-08-05
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 0199752834
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChief Justice John Marshall argued that a constitution "requires that only its great outlines should be marked [and] its important objects designated." Ours is "intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." In recent years, Marshall's great truths have been challenged by proponents of originalism and strict construction. Such legal thinkers as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argue that the Constitution must be construed and applied as it was when the Framers wrote it. In Keeping Faith with the Constitution, three legal authorities make the case for Marshall's vision. They describe their approach as "constitutional fidelity"--not to how the Framers would have applied the Constitution, but to the text and principles of the Constitution itself. The original understanding of the text is one source of interpretation, but not the only one; to preserve the meaning and authority of the document, to keep it vital, applications of the Constitution must be shaped by precedent, historical experience, practical consequence, and societal change. The authors range across the history of constitutional interpretation to show how this approach has been the source of our greatest advances, from Brown v. Board of Education to the New Deal, from the Miranda decision to the expansion of women's rights. They delve into the complexities of voting rights, the malapportionment of legislative districts, speech freedoms, civil liberties and the War on Terror, and the evolution of checks and balances. The Constitution's framers could never have imagined DNA, global warming, or even women's equality. Yet these and many more realities shape our lives and outlook. Our Constitution will remain vital into our changing future, the authors write, if judges remain true to this rich tradition of adaptation and fidelity.
The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy
Author: John Agresto
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-10-15
Total Pages: 184
ISBN-13: 1501712918
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy John Agresto traces the development of American judicial power, paying close attention to what he views as the very real threat of judicial supremacy. Agresto examines the role of the judiciary in a democratic society and discusses the proper place of congressional power in constitutional issues. Agresto argues that while the separation of congressional and judicial functions is a fundamental tenet of American government, the present system is not effective in maintaining an appropriate balance of power. He shows that continued judicial expansion, especially into the realm of public policy, might have severe consequences for America's national life and direction, and offers practical recommendations for safeguarding against an increasingly powerful Supreme Court. John Agresto's controversial argument, set in the context of a historical and theoretical inquiry, will be of great interest to scholars and students in political science and law, especially American constitutional law and political theory.
Chasing Gideon
Author: Karen Houppert
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2013-03-19
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 1595588698
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn March 18, 1963, in one of its most significant legal decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that all defendants facing significant jail time have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders. In a book that combines the sweep of history with the intimate details of individual lives and legal cases, veteran reporter Karen Houppert movingly chronicles the stories of people in all parts of the country who have relied on Gideon’s promise. There is the harrowing saga of a young man who is charged with involuntary vehicular homicide in Washington State, where overextended public defenders juggle impossible caseloads, forcing his defender to go to court to protect her own right to provide an adequate defense. In Florida, Houppert describes a public defender’s office, loaded with upward of seven hundred cases per attorney, and discovers the degree to which Clarence Earl Gideon’s promise is still unrealized. In New Orleans, she follows the case of a man imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a crime he didn’t commit, finding a public defense system already near collapse before Katrina and chronicling the harrowing months after the storm, during which overworked volunteers and students struggled to get the system working again. In Georgia, Houppert finds a mentally disabled man who is to be executed for murder, despite the best efforts of a dedicated but severely overworked and underfunded capital defender. Half a century after Anthony Lewis’s award-winning Gideon’s Trumpet brought us the story of the court case that changed the American justice system, Chasing Gideon is a crucial book that provides essential reckoning of our attempts to implement this fundamental constitutional right.
Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution
Author: Myron Magnet
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2019-05-07
Total Pages: 139
ISBN-13: 1641770538
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people’s representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan “experts,” an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court—the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language—he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas’s biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America’s future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.
The Classical Liberal Constitution
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
The Three Branches
Author: Christoph Möllers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-03-14
Total Pages: 275
ISBN-13: 0199602115
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe idea of the separation of powers is still popular in much political and constitutional discourse, though its meaning for the modern state remains unclear and contested. This book develops a new, comprehensive, and systematic account of the principle. It then applies this new concept to legal problems of different national constitutional orders, the law of the European Union, and international institutional law. It connects an argument from normative political theory with phenomena taken from comparative constitutional law. The book argues that the conflict between individual liberty and democratic self-determination that is characteristic of modern constitutionalism is proceduralized through the establishment of different governmental branches. A close analysis of the relation between individual and collective autonomy on the one hand and the ways lawmaking through public institutions can be established on the other hand helps us identify criteria for determining how legislative, administrative, and judicial lawmaking can be distinguished and should be organized. These criteria define a common ground in the confusing variety of western constitutional traditions and their diverse use of the notion of separated powers. They also enable us to establish a normative framework that throws a fresh perspective on problems of constitutional law in different constitutional systems: constitutional judicial review of legislation, limits of legislative delegation, parliamentary control of the executive, and standing. Linking arguments from comparative constitutional law and international law, the book then uses this framework to offer a new perspective on the debate on constitutionalism beyond the state. The concept permits certain institutional insights of the constitutional experiences within states to be applied at the international level without falling into any form of methodological nationalism.
Court Justice
Author: Ed O'Bannon
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2018-02-13
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1635762618
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“Like Curt Flood and Oscar Robertson, who paved the way for free agency in sports, Ed O’Bannon decided there was a principle at stake... O’Bannon gave the movement to reform college sports...passion and purpose, animated by righteous indignation.” —Jeremy Schaap, ESPN journalist and New York Times bestselling author In 2009, Ed O’Bannon, once a star for the 1995 NCAA Champion UCLA Bruins and a first-round NBA draft pick, thought he’d made peace with the NCAA’s exploitive system of “amateurism.” College athletes generated huge profits, yet—training nearly full-time, forced to tailor coursework around sports, often pawns in corrupt investigations—they saw little from those riches other than revocable scholarships and miniscule chances of going pro. Still, that was all in O’Bannon’s past...until he saw the video game NCAA Basketball 09. As avatars of their college selves—their likenesses, achievements, and playing styles—O’Bannon and his teammates were still making money for the NCAA. So, when asked to fight the system for players past, present, and future—and seeking no personal financial reward, but rather the chance to make college sports more fair—he agreed to be the face of what became a landmark class-action lawsuit. Court Justice brings readers to the front lines of a critical battle in the long fight for players’ rights while also offering O’Bannon’s unique perspective on today’s NCAA recruiting scandals. From the basketball court to the court of law facing NCAA executives, athletic directors, and “expert” witnesses; and finally to his innovative ideas for reform, O’Bannon breaks down history’s most important victory yet against the inequitable model of multi-billion-dollar “amateur” sports.
