This book attempts to convey some of the challenges that those wielding the law for social change purposes have faced and the successes they have achieved. By intention, it is more a studied appreciation than a critical analysis of their efforts. We asked an international team of consultants to help us document and describe how various law-based strategies have worked in very different settings, to draw out connections between those efforts, and to highlight some of the insights that emerge from grantees' experiences in law-related work. We also asked them to help us learn more about the ways the Foundation has played a role in these efforts. Known as the Global Law Programs Learning Initiative (GLPLI), this effort is not definitive, but rather suggestive. Our goal is to contribute to more serious future reflection and, ultimately, more effective programs in this field.
Starting in the 1970s, conservatives learned that electoral victory did not easily convert into a reversal of important liberal accomplishments, especially in the law. As a result, conservatives' mobilizing efforts increasingly turned to law schools, professional networks, public interest groups, and the judiciary--areas traditionally controlled by liberals. Drawing from internal documents, as well as interviews with key conservative figures, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement examines this sometimes fitful, and still only partially successful, conservative challenge to liberal domination of the law and American legal institutions. Unlike accounts that depict the conservatives as fiendishly skilled, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement reveals the formidable challenges that conservatives faced in competing with legal liberalism. Steven Teles explores how conservative mobilization was shaped by the legal profession, the legacy of the liberal movement, and the difficulties in matching strategic opportunities with effective organizational responses. He explains how foundations and groups promoting conservative ideas built a network designed to dislodge legal liberalism from American elite institutions. And he portrays the reality, not of a grand strategy masterfully pursued, but of individuals and political entrepreneurs learning from trial and error. Using previously unavailable materials from the Olin Foundation, Federalist Society, Center for Individual Rights, Institute for Justice, and Law and Economics Center, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement provides an unprecedented look at the inner life of the conservative movement. Lawyers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and activists seeking to learn from the conservative experience in the law will find it compelling reading.
The Necessary and Proper Clause is one of the most important parts of the US Constitution. Today this short thirty-nine-word paragraph is cited as the legal foundation for much of the modern federal government. Through three independent lines of research, the authors trace the lineage of the Necessary and Proper Clause to the everyday law of the Founding Era - the same law that American founders such as Madison, Hamilton, and Washington applied in their daily lives. Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause are found in law-governing agencies, public administration, and corporations. Moreover, all of those areas were undergirded by common principles of fiduciary responsibility - reflecting the Founders' view that a public office is truly a public trust. This explains the choice of language in the clause and provides clues about its meaning. This book thus serves as a reference source for scholars seeking to understand the intellectual foundations of one of the Constitution's most important clauses.
"Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea recasts the gun debate by showing its importance to the future of democracy and the modern regulatory state. Until now, gun rights advocates had effectively co-opted the language of liberty and democracy and made it their own. This book is an important first step in demonstrating how reasonable gun control is essential to the survival of democracy and ordered liberty." ---Saul Cornell, Ohio State University When gun enthusiasts talk about constitutional liberties guaranteed by the Second Amendment, they are referring to freedom in a general sense, but they also have something more specific in mind---freedom from government oppression. They argue that the only way to keep federal authority in check is to arm individual citizens who can, if necessary, defend themselves from an aggressive government. In the past decade, this view of the proper relationship between government and individual rights and the insistence on a role for private violence in a democracy has been co-opted by the conservative movement. As a result, it has spread beyond extreme militia groups to influence state and national policy. In Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea, Joshua Horwitz and Casey Anderson set the record straight. They challenge the proposition that more guns equal more freedom and expose Insurrectionism as a true threat to freedom in the United States today. Joshua Horwitz received a law degree from George Washington University and is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Casey Anderson holds a law degree from Georgetown University and is currently a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C.
When we think of constitutional law, we invariably think of the United States Supreme Court and the federal court system. Yet much of our constitutional law is not made at the federal level. In 51 Imperfect Solutions, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton argues that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in protecting individual liberties. The book tells four stories that arise in four different areas of constitutional law: equal protection; criminal procedure; privacy; and free speech and free exercise of religion. Traditional accounts of these bedrock debates about the relationship of the individual to the state focus on decisions of the United States Supreme Court. But these explanations tell just part of the story. The book corrects this omission by looking at each issue-and some others as well-through the lens of many constitutions, not one constitution; of many courts, not one court; and of all American judges, not federal or state judges. Taken together, the stories reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system, one that ought to make lawyers and litigants pause before reflexively assuming that the United States Supreme Court alone has all of the answers to the most vexing constitutional questions. If there is a central conviction of the book, it's that an underappreciation of state constitutional law has hurt state and federal law and has undermined the appropriate balance between state and federal courts in protecting individual liberty. In trying to correct this imbalance, the book also offers several ideas for reform.
If federalism is about protecting the states, why not listen to them? In the last decade, the Supreme Court has reworked significant areas of constitutional law with the professed purpose of protecting the dignity and authority of the states, while frequently disregarding the states'' views as to what federalism is all about. The Court, according to the states, is protecting federalism too much and too little. Too much, in striking down federal law where even the states recognize that a federal role is necessary to address a national problem. Too little, in inappropriately limiting state experimentation. By listening more carefully to the States, the Supreme Court could transform its federalism jurisprudence from a source of criticism and polarization to a doctrine that should win broad support from across the political spectrum. In this important book, six distinguished authors redefine federalism and reaffirm Justice Louis Brandeis's vision of states and localities as the laboratories of democracy.
