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Author: Donald L. Drakeman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-04-08
Total Pages: 247
ISBN-13: 1108485286
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first major scholarly defense of the centrality of the Framers' intentions in constitutional interpretation to appear in years.
Author: Donald L. Drakeman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-04-08
Total Pages: 247
ISBN-13: 1108618030
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Hollow Core of Constitutional Theory is the first major defense of the central role of the Framers' intentions in constitutional interpretation to appear in years. This book starts with a reminder that, for virtually all of Western legal history, when judges interpreted legal texts, their goal was to identify the lawmaker's will. However, for the past fifty years, constitutional theory has increasingly shifted its focus away from the Framers. Contemporary constitutional theorists, who often disagree with each other about virtually everything else, have come to share the view that the Framers' understandings are unknowable and irrelevant. This book shows why constitutional interpretation needs to return to its historical core inquiry, which is a search for the Framers' intentions. Doing so is practically feasible, theoretically defensible, and equally important not only for discovering the original meaning, but also for deciding how to apply the Constitution today.
Author: Brian Christopher Jones
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Published: 2020-06-26
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 1788971108
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConstitutional Idolatry and Democracy investigates the increasingly important subject of constitutional idolatry and its effects on democracy. Focussed around whether the UK should draft a single written constitution, it suggests that constitutions have been drastically and persistently over-sold throughout the years, and that their wider importance and effects are not nearly as significant as constitutional advocates maintain. Chapters analyse whether written constitutions can educate the citizenry, invigorate voter turnout, or deliver ‘We the People’ sovereignty.
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.
Author: Paul M. Collins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-06-24
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 1107039703
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book demonstrates that the hearings to confirm Supreme Court nominees are in fact a democratic forum for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change.
Author: Frances E. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-06-20
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 1108754260
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCan America Govern Itself? brings together a diverse group of distinguished scholars to analyze how rising party polarization and economic inequality have affected the performance of American governing institutions. It is organized around two themes: the changing nature of representation in the United States; and how changes in the political environment have affected the internal processes of institutions, overall government performance, and policy outcomes. The chapters in this volume analyze concerns about power, influence and representation in American politics, the quality of deliberation and political communications, the management and implementation of public policy, and the performance of an eighteenth century constitution in today's polarized political environment. These renowned scholars provide a deeper and more systematic grasp of what is new, and what is perennial in challenges to democracy at a fraught moment.
Author: Peter Charles Hoffer
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2021-03-26
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 070063200X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDaniel Webster and the Unfinished Constitution reveals Webster as the foremost constitutional lawyer of his day. Peter Charles Hoffer builds a persuasive case that Webster was more than a skilled practitioner who rose rapidly from his hardscrabble New Hampshire origins. Hoffer thoroughly documents the ways in which Webster was an innovative jurist. While Chief Justice John Marshall gets credit for much of our early constitutional jurisprudence, in fact in a series of key cases Marshall simply borrowed Webster’s oral and written arguments. For Webster, Marshall, and many lawyers and jurists of their day, professions of adherence to the Constitution were universal. Yet they knew that the Constitution could not be fixed in time; its text needed to be read in light of the rapidly transforming early republic and antebellum eras or it would become irrelevant. As Chief Justice Marshall explained in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux (1809): “A constitution, from its nature, deals in generals, not in detail. Its framers cannot perceive minute distinctions which arise in the progress of the nation, and therefore confine it to the establishment of broad and general principles.” But were these “broad and general principles” themselves fixed? For Webster there were landmarks: the Contract Clause and the Commerce Clause. While others were exploring and surveying the Northwest Territory and the Louisiana Purchase, Webster set out to map the spaces in the constitutional and legal landscape that were unmarked. Peter Charles Hoffer provides an insightful and timely study of how Webster’s analysis of three key constitutional issues is relevant to today’s constitutional conflicts: the relationship between law and politics, between public policy and private rights, and between the federal government and the states, all of which remain contentious in our constitutional jurisprudence and crucial to our constitutional order.
Author: Donald L. Drakeman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 383
ISBN-13: 0521119189
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis provocative book shows how the justices of the United States Supreme Court have used constitutional history, portraying the Framers' actions in a light favoring their own views about how church and state should be separated. Drakeman examines church-state constitutional controversies from the Founding Era to the present, arguing that the Framers originally intended the establishment clause only as a prohibition against a single national church.
Author: J. Harvie Wilkinson
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2012-03-12
Total Pages: 174
ISBN-13: 0199846014
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat underlies this development? In this concise and highly engaging work, Federal Appeals Court Judge and noted author (From Brown to Bakke) J. Harvie Wilkinson argues that America's most brilliant legal minds have launched a set of cosmic constitutional theories that, for all their value, are undermining self-governance.
Author: Mariah Zeisberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-09-01
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 0691168032
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArmed interventions in Libya, Haiti, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea challenged the US president and Congress with a core question of constitutional interpretation: does the president, or Congress, have constitutional authority to take the country to war? War Powers argues that the Constitution doesn't offer a single legal answer to that question. But its structure and values indicate a vision of a well-functioning constitutional politics, one that enables the branches of government themselves to generate good answers to this question for the circumstances of their own times. Mariah Zeisberg shows that what matters is not that the branches enact the same constitutional settlement for all conditions, but instead how well they bring their distinctive governing capacities to bear on their interpretive work in context. Because the branches legitimately approach constitutional questions in different ways, interpretive conflicts between them can sometimes indicate a successful rather than deficient interpretive politics. Zeisberg argues for a set of distinctive constitutional standards for evaluating the branches and their relationship to one another, and she demonstrates how observers and officials can use those standards to evaluate the branches' constitutional politics. With cases ranging from the Mexican War and World War II to the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Iran-Contra scandal, War Powers reinterprets central controversies of war powers scholarship and advances a new way of evaluating the constitutional behavior of officials outside of the judiciary.
