Constitutional Fate

Author : Philip Bobbitt
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199878587
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Constitutional Fate written by Philip Bobbitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1984-03-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Philip Bobbitt studies the basis for the legitimacy of judicial review by examining six types of constitutional argument--historical, textual, structural, prudential doctrinal, and ethical--through the unusual method of contrasting sketches of prominent legal figures responding to the constitutional crises of their day.

Author : Philip Bobbitt
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780195189476
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Constitutional Fate written by Philip Bobbitt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-31 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lorri Glover
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN 13 : 1421420031
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fate of the Revolution written by Lorri Glover and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the 1788 Virginia Ratification Convention explores the Constitutional debates that decided the nation’s fate and still resonate today. In May 1788, elected delegates from every county in Virginia gathered in Richmond where they would either accept or reject the highly controversial United States Constitution. The rest of the country kept an anxious vigil, keenly aware that without Virginia—the young Republic’s largest and most populous state—the Constitution was doomed. In The Fate of the Revolution, Lorri Glover explains why Virginia’s wrangling over ratification led to such heated political debate. Virginians were roughly split in their opinions, as were the delegates they elected. Patrick Henry, for example, the greatest orator of the age, opposed James Madison, the intellectual force behind the Constitution. The two sides were so evenly matched that in the last days of the convention, the savviest political observers still couldn’t predict the outcome. Mining an incredible wealth of sources, including letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and transcripts, Glover brings these political discussions to life, exploring the constitutional questions that echo across American history.

Author : Myron Magnet
Publisher : Encounter Books
ISBN 13 : 1641770538
Total Pages : 151 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution written by Myron Magnet and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When 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.

Author : Akhil Reed Amar
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1588364879
Total Pages : 672 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America's Constitution written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In America’s Constitution, one of this era’s most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of one of the world’s great political texts. Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it. We all know this much: the Constitution is neither immutable nor perfect. Amar shows us how the story of this one relatively compact document reflects the story of America more generally. (For example, much of the Constitution, including the glorious-sounding “We the People,” was lifted from existing American legal texts, including early state constitutions.) In short, the Constitution was as much a product of its environment as it was a product of its individual creators’ inspired genius. Despite the Constitution’s flaws, its role in guiding our republic has been nothing short of amazing. Skillfully placing the document in the context of late-eighteenth-century American politics, America’s Constitution explains, for instance, whether there is anything in the Constitution that is unamendable; the reason America adopted an electoral college; why a president must be at least thirty-five years old; and why–for now, at least–only those citizens who were born under the American flag can become president. From his unique perspective, Amar also gives us unconventional wisdom about the Constitution and its significance throughout the nation’s history. For one thing, we see that the Constitution has been far more democratic than is conventionally understood. Even though the document was drafted by white landholders, a remarkably large number of citizens (by the standards of 1787) were allowed to vote up or down on it, and the document’s later amendments eventually extended the vote to virtually all Americans. We also learn that the Founders’ Constitution was far more slavocratic than many would acknowledge: the “three fifths” clause gave the South extra political clout for every slave it owned or acquired. As a result, slaveholding Virginians held the presidency all but four of the Republic’s first thirty-six years, and proslavery forces eventually came to dominate much of the federal government prior to Lincoln’s election. Ambitious, even-handed, eminently accessible, and often surprising, America’s Constitution is an indispensable work, bound to become a standard reference for any student of history and all citizens of the United States.

Author : Philip Bobbitt
Publisher : Atlantic Books
ISBN 13 : 1782391428
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Garments of Court and Palace written by Philip Bobbitt and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times-bestselling author presents a provocative new interpretation of The Prince The Prince, a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, is widely regarded as the most important exploration of politics—and in particular the politics of power—ever written. In Garments of Court and Palace, Philip Bobbitt, a preeminent and original interpreter of modern statecraft, presents a vivid portrait of Machiavelli's Italy and demonstrates how The Prince articulates a new idea of government that emerged during the Renaissance. Bobbitt argues that when The Prince is read alongside the Discourses, modern readers can see clearly how Machiavelli prophesied the end of the feudal era and the birth of a recognizably modern polity. As this book shows, publication of The Prince in 1532 represents nothing less than a revolutionary moment in our understanding of the place of the law and war in the creation and maintenance of the modern state.

Author : A.V. Dicey
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 134917968X
Total Pages : 729 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution written by A.V. Dicey and published by Springer. This book was released on 1985-09-30 with total page 729 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A starting point for the study of the English Constitution and comparative constitutional law, The Law of the Constitution elucidates the guiding principles of the modern constitution of England: the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, and the binding force of unwritten conventions.

Author : Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Publisher : Forum Books
ISBN 13 : 0307449386
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Who Killed the Constitution? written by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” —Thomas Jefferson The United States Constitution—the bedrock of our country, the foundation of our federal republic—is . . . dead. You won’t hear that from the politicians who endlessly pay lip service to the Constitution. It’s the dirty little secret that bestselling authors Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman expose in this provocative new book. The fact is that government officials—Democrats and Republicans, presidents, judges, and congresses alike—long ago rejected the idea that the Constitution possesses a fixed meaning limiting the U.S. government’s power. In case you’ve forgotten, this idea was not a minor aspect of the Constitution; it was the document’s very purpose. Woods and Gutzman round up the suspects responsible for the death of the government the Founding Fathers designed. Going right to the scenes of the crimes, they dissect twelve of the most egregious assaults on the Constitution—some virtually unknown. In chronicling this “dirty dozen,” the authors show that the attacks began long before presidents declared preemptive wars, congresses built pork-barrel bridges to nowhere, and Supreme Court justices began to behave as our supreme legislators. In Who Killed the Constitution? Woods and Gutzman • REVEAL the federal government’s “great gold robbery”—the flagrant assault on the Constitution you never heard about in history class • DESTROY the phony case for presidential war power • EXPOSE how the federal government has actively discriminated to end . . . discrimination • TEAR DOWN the “wall of separation” between church and state—an invention that completely contradicts what the Constitution says • DARE to touch the “third rail of American jurisprudence,” Brown v. Board of Education—showing why a government decision that seems “right” isn’t necessarily constitutional Never shying away from controversy, Woods and Gutzman reveal an unsettling but unavoidable truth: now that the federal government has broken free of the Constitution’s chains, government officials are restrained by little more than their sense of what they can get away with. Who Killed the Constitution? is a rallying cry for Americans outraged by government run amok and a warning to take heed before we lose the liberties we are truly entitled to.

Author : Mary Anne Franks
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503609103
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cult of the Constitution written by Mary Anne Franks and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerful challenge to the prevailing constitutional orthodoxy of the right and the left . . . A deeply troubling and absolutely vital book” (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate). In this provocative book, Mary Anne Franks examines the thin line between constitutional fidelity and constitutional fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution reveals how deep fundamentalist strains in both conservative and liberal American thought keep the Constitution in the service of white male supremacy. Franks demonstrates how constitutional fundamentalists read the Constitution selectively and self-servingly, thus undermining the integrity of the document as a whole. She goes on to argue that economic and civil libertarianism have merged to produce a deregulatory, “free-market” approach to constitutional rights that achieves fullest expression in the idealization of the Internet. The fetishization of the first and second amendments has blurred the boundaries between conduct and speech and between veneration and violence. But the Constitution itself contains the antidote to fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution lays bare the dark, antidemocratic consequences of constitutional fundamentalism and urges readers to take the Constitution seriously, not selectively.

Author : Mark E. Neely Jr.
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807869023
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation written by Mark E. Neely Jr. and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War placed the U.S. Constitution under unprecedented--and, to this day, still unmatched--strain. In Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely examines for the first time in one book the U.S. Constitution and its often overlooked cousin, the Confederate Constitution, and the ways the documents shaped the struggle for national survival. Previous scholars have examined wartime challenges to civil liberties and questions of presidential power, but Neely argues that the constitutional conflict extended to the largest questions of national existence. Drawing on judicial opinions, presidential state papers, and political pamphlets spiced with the everyday immediacy of the partisan press, Neely reveals how judges, lawyers, editors, politicians, and government officials, both North and South, used their constitutions to fight the war and save, or create, their nation. Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation illuminates how the U.S. Constitution not only survived its greatest test but emerged stronger after the war. That this happened at a time when the nation's very existence was threatened, Neely argues, speaks ultimately to the wisdom of the Union leadership, notably President Lincoln and his vision of the American nation.