Equal Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the Constitution

Equal Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the Constitution

Author: Christopher Green

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1317539397

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is arguably the most historically important clause of the most significant part of the US Constitution. Designed to be a central guarantor of civil rights and civil liberties following Reconstruction, this clause could have been at the center of most of the country's constitutional controversies, not only during Reconstruction, but in the modern period as well; yet for a variety of historical reasons, including precedent-setting narrow interpretations, the Privileges or Immunities Clause has been cast aside by the Supreme Court. This book investigates the Clause in a textualist-originalist manner, an approach increasingly popular among both academics and judges, to examine the meanings actually expressed by the text in its original context. Arguing for a revival of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, author Christopher Green lays the groundwork for assessing the originalist credentials of such areas of law as school segregation, state action, sex discrimination, incorporation of the Bill of Rights against states, the relationship between tradition and policy analysis in assessing fundamental rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment rights of corporations and aliens. Thoroughly argued and historically well-researched, this book demonstrates that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects liberty and equality, and it will be of interest to legal academics, American legal historians, and anyone interested in American constitutional history.


Citizenship as Foundation of Rights

Citizenship as Foundation of Rights

Author: Richard Sobel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1107128293

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Citizenship as Foundation of Rights explains what it means to have citizen rights and how national identification requirements undermine them.


The Color-Blind Constitution

The Color-Blind Constitution

Author: Andrew Kull

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780674039803

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From 1840 to 1960 the profoundest claim of Americans who fought the institution of segregation was that the government had no business sorting citizens by the color of their skin. During these years the moral and political attractiveness of the antidiscrimination principle made it the ultimate legal objective of the American civil rights movement. Yet, in the contemporary debate over the politics and constitutional law of race, the vital theme of antidiscrimination has been largely suppressed. Thus a strong line of argument laying down one theoretical basis for the constitutional protection of civil rights has been lost. Andrew Kull provides us with the previously unwritten history of the color-blind idea. From the arguments of Wendell Phillips and the Garrisonian abolitionists, through the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy, civil rights advocates have consistently attempted to locate the antidiscrimination principle in the Constitution. The real alternative, embraced by the Supreme Court in 1896, was a constitutional guarantee of reasonable classification. The government, it said, had the power to classify persons by race so long as it acted reasonably; the judiciary would decide what was reasonable. In our own time, in Brown v. Board of Education and the decisions that followed, the Court nearly avowed the rule of color blindness that civil rights lawyers continued to assert; instead, it veered off for political and tactical reasons, deciding racial cases without stating constitutional principle. The impoverishment of the antidiscrimination theme in the Court's decision prefigured the affirmative action shift in the civil rights agenda. The social upheaval of the 1960s put the color-blind Constitution out of reach for a quartercentury or more; but for the hard choices still to be made in racial policy, the colorblind tradition of civil rights retains both historical and practical significance.


The Second Founding

The Second Founding

Author: Ilan Wurman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1108843158

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment, Ilan Wurman provides an illuminating introduction to the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment's famous provisions 'due process of law,' 'equal protection of the laws,' and the 'privileges' or 'immunities' of citizenship. He begins by exploring the antebellum legal meanings of these concepts, starting from Magna Carta, the Statutes of Edward III, and the Petition of Right to William Blackstone and antebellum state court cases. The book then traces how these concepts solved historical problems confronting framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, including the comity rights of free blacks, private violence and the denial of the protection of the laws, and the notorious abridgment of freedmen's rights in the Black Codes. Wurman makes a compelling case that, if the modern originalist Supreme Court interpreted the Amendment in 'the language of the law,' it would lead to surprising and desirable results today.


The Democratic Experiment

The Democratic Experiment

Author: Meg Jacobs

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1400825822

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In a series of fascinating essays that explore topics in American politics from the nation's founding to the present day , The Democratic Experiment opens up exciting new avenues for historical research while offering bold claims about the tensions that have animated American public life. Revealing the fierce struggles that have taken place over the role of the federal government and the character of representative democracy, the authors trace the contested and dynamic evolution of the national polity. The contributors, who represent the leading new voices in the revitalized field of American political history, offer original interpretations of the nation's political past by blending methodological insights from the new institutionalism in the social sciences and studies of political culture. They tackle topics as wide-ranging as the role of personal character of political elites in the Early Republic, to the importance of courts in building a modern regulatory state, to the centrality of local political institutions in the late twentieth century. Placing these essays side by side encourages the asking of new questions about the forces that have shaped American politics over time. An unparalleled example of the new political history in action, this book will be vastly influential in the field. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Brian Balogh, Sven Beckert, Rebecca Edwards, Joanne B. Freeman, Richard R. John, Ira Katznelson, James T. Kloppenberg, Matthew D. Lassiter, Thomas J. Sugrue, Michael Vorenberg, and Michael Willrich.


The Constitution in the Supreme Court

The Constitution in the Supreme Court

Author: David P. Currie

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-09

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 0226131092

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Currie's masterful synthesis of legal analysis and narrative history, gives us a sophisticated and much-needed evaluation of the Supreme Court's first hundred years. "A thorough, systematic, and careful assessment. . . . As a reference work for constitutional teachers, it is a gold mine."—Charles A. Lofgren, Constitutional Commentary


Everyman's Constitution

Everyman's Constitution

Author: Howard Jay Graham

Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society

Published: 2013-05-31

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13: 0870206354

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1938, Howard Jay Graham, a deaf law librarian, successfully argued that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment--ratified after the American Civil War to establish equal protection under the law for all American citizens regardless of race--were motivated by abolitionist fervor, debunking the notion of a corporate conspiracy at the heart of the amendment's wording. For over half a century, the amendment had been used to endow corporations with rights as individuals and thus protect them from state legislation. By 1968, when Everyman's Constitution was first published, the Fourteenth Amendment had become a tool for the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to apply to all American citizens. The essays in this reprinted edition are still relevant as the nation continues to interpret our framing legislation in light of the concerns of today and to balance citizens' rights against those of corporations. Howard Jay Graham was a law librarian brought in by the NAACP's legal team to write a brief on the Fourteenth Amendment for the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Though the Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of the NAACP based on the sociological rather than historical evidence it provided, Graham's work, published in various law journals over several decades, contributed greatly to the ongoing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.


Citizenship Reimagined

Citizenship Reimagined

Author: Allan Colbern

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-22

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 110884104X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

States have historically led in rights expansion for marginalized populations and remain leaders today on the rights of undocumented immigrants.