Author: Ellen Kennedy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822332435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
DIVThe author's argument that Carl Schmitt's critique of Weimar Republic liberalism cannot be countered by reforming liberalism is also a contribution to current political theory and an analysis of contemporary liberalism./div
Author: Zeynep Yanasmayan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108497624
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
Offers an in-depth case study of the failure of popular constitution making in Turkey from 2011 to 2013.
Author: Aziz Z. Huq
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197556817
Category : LAW
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
"This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--
Author: Raoul Berger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674444782
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
The little understood yet great power of impeachment lodged in the Congress is dissected in this text through history by Raoul Berger, a leading scholar on the subject. He sheds new light on whether impeachment is limited to indictable crimes, on whether there is jurisdiction to impeach for misconduct outside office, and on whether impeachment must precede indictment. Berger also finds firm footing in contesting the views of one-time Judge Robert Bork and President Nixon's lawyer, James St Clair.
Author: Evan Gerstmann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226288598
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
When the Supreme Court struck down Colorado's Amendment 2—which would have nullified all state and local laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination—it was widely regarded as a victory for gay rights. Yet many gays and lesbians still risk losing their jobs, custody of their children, and even their liberty under the law. Using the Colorado initiative as his focus, Gerstmann untangles the complex standards and subtle rhetoric the Supreme Court uses to apply the equal protection clause. The Court divides people into legal classes that receive varying levels of protection; gays and lesbians and other groups, such as the elderly and the poor, receive the least. Gerstmann reveals how these standards are used to favor certain groups over others, and also how Amendment 2 advocates used the Court's doctrine to convince voters that gays and lesbians were seeking "special rights" in Colorado. Concluding with a call for wholesale reform of equal-protection jurisprudence, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in fair, coherent, and truly equal protection under the law.
Author: Robert R. Owens
Publisher: Xulon Press
ISBN: 1612150942
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
How can you say, "The Constitution failed?" Don't you mean, "We failed the Constitution?" Or is that a distinction without a difference? Since the declared and understood purpose to the writing and ratification of the Constitution was to create and sustain a limited government and since We the People now face an unlimited government Dr. Owens maintains we face the painful reality, "The Constitution failed." As a member of the Richmond Tea Party and a contributing author to the websites of numerous Tea Parties across the fruited plane Dr. Robert Owens, the author of the History of the Future builds upon Dispatches from that History to show not only that the Constitution has failed but that in many ways that failure was foretold before it was ever ratified by the arguments of the Anti-Federalists. He then goes on to offer recommendations for how We the People can organize and advocate for a solution which will preserve liberty in the land of the free and the home of the brave."
Author: Steven Douglas Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195132483
Category : Church and state
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Ever since the Supreme Court began enforcing the First Amendment's religion clauses in the 1940s, courts and scholars have tried to distill the meaning of those clauses into a useable principle of religious freedom. In Foreordained Failure, Smith argues that efforts to find a principle of religious freedom in the "original meaning" are futile, but not because the original meaning is irrecoverable. The difficulty is that the religion clauses were not originally intended to approve any principle or right of religious freedom. Rather, the clauses were purely jurisdictional in nature; they were intended to do nothing more than confirm that authority over questions of religion remained with the states. This work will be of great interest to law scholars, lawyers, judges, and other readers concerned with the subject of religious freedom.
Author: Kermit Hall
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780618543335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the Major Problems series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in US history.This collection, designed to be the primary anthology for the introductory survey course, covers the entire chronological span of Constitutional history.Tracing the historical development of American constitutional thought, the Second Edition of this anthology presents the documents critical to constitutional development, including actual legal texts as well as the reactions of prominent legal minds.
Author: Ellen Kennedy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385570
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Constitutional Failure is a major contribution to studies of the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), the Weimar Republic, and the relationship of constitutionalism, political economy, and democracy. An internationally renowned scholar of Weimar legal theory, Ellen Kennedy brought Schmitt’s neglected work to the attention of English-speaking readers with her highly regarded translations of his work and studies of its place in twentieth-century political theory. In this eagerly awaited book, she tracks Schmitt’s contribution to the canon of Western political philosophy during its most difficult and dangerous moment—the time of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich—demonstrating the centrality of his thought to understandings of the modern constitutional state and its precarious economic and social foundations. Kennedy reveals how Schmitt’s argument for a strong but neutral state supported the maximization of market freedom at the cost of the political constitution. She argues that the major fault lines of Weimar liberalism—emergency powers, the courts as “defenders of the constitution,” mass mobilization of anti-liberal politics, ethnic-identity politics, a culture of resentment and contested legitimacy—are not exceptions within the liberal-democratic orders of the West, but central to them. Contending that Schmitt’s thought remains vital today because liberal norms are inadequate to the political challenges facing constitutional systems as diverse as those of Eastern Europe and the United States, Kennedy develops a compelling, rigorous argument that unsettles many assumptions about liberalism, democracy, and dictatorship.
Author: Sotirios Barber
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700620079
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Americans err in thinking that while their politics may be ailing, their Constitution is fine. Sick politics is a sure sign of constitutional failure. This is Sotirios Barber’s message in Constitutional Failure. Public attitudes fostered by a consumer culture, constitution worship, the lack of a trusted leadership community, and academic historicism and value skepticism—these, this book tells us in clear and bracing terms, are at the root of our political dysfunction. Barber characterizes the Constitution as a plan of government—a set of means to public purposes like national security and prosperity. He argues that if the government is failing, it’s fair to conclude that the plan is failing and that laws that are supposed to serve as means can’t in reason continue to bind when they no longer work. He argues further that constitutional success depends ultimately on a stratum of diverse and self-critical citizens, who see each other as moral equals and parts of one national community. These citizens, with the politicians among them, would be good-faith contestants regarding the meaning of the common good and the most effective means to secure it. In this way—showing how the success of a constitutional democracy is more a matter of political attitudes than of institutional performance—Barber’s book upends the conventional understanding of constitutional failure. In Barber’s analysis, the apparent stability of formal constitutional institutions—usually interpreted as evidence of constitutional health—may actually indicate the defining element of constitutional failure: a mentally inert citizenry no longer capable of constitutional reflection and reform. At once concise and thorough in its analysis of the concept of constitutional failure and its accounts of a “healthy politics,” the corrosive impact of Madisonian checks and balances (as a substitute for trustworthy leadership), and the outlook for meaningful reform, this book offers a carefully reasoned and provocative assessment of the viability of constitutional governance in the United States.
