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Author: Bradley C. S. Watson
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504066391
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
A “living” constitution. Runaway courts. Legislating from the bench. These phrases come up a lot in the national political debate. They raise the ire of many Americans. But where did the ideas come from? Why do courts play a role so alien to the one the American Founders outlined? And how did unelected judges gain so much power in our democratic republic? Political scientist and legal philosopher Bradley C. S. Watson provides the answers in this important book. To understand why courts today rule the way they do, Watson shows, you must go back more than a century. You’ll find the philosophical and historical roots of judicial activism in the late nineteenth century. Watson traces a line from social Darwinism and pragmatism, through the rise of Progressivism, to our situation today. Living Constitution, Dying Faith reveals a radical transformation of American political thought. This ebook features a new introduction examining the latest developments—which only highlight the prescience of Watson’s arguments.
Author: Bradley C. S. Watson
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504066391
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
A “living” constitution. Runaway courts. Legislating from the bench. These phrases come up a lot in the national political debate. They raise the ire of many Americans. But where did the ideas come from? Why do courts play a role so alien to the one the American Founders outlined? And how did unelected judges gain so much power in our democratic republic? Political scientist and legal philosopher Bradley C. S. Watson provides the answers in this important book. To understand why courts today rule the way they do, Watson shows, you must go back more than a century. You’ll find the philosophical and historical roots of judicial activism in the late nineteenth century. Watson traces a line from social Darwinism and pragmatism, through the rise of Progressivism, to our situation today. Living Constitution, Dying Faith reveals a radical transformation of American political thought. This ebook features a new introduction examining the latest developments—which only highlight the prescience of Watson’s arguments.
Author: Bradley C. S. Watson
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
In Living Constitution, Dying Faith, political scientist and legal historian Bradley Watson examines how the contemporary embrace of the "living" Constitution has arisen from the radical transformation of American political thought. This transformation, brought about in the late nineteenth century by the philosophies of social Darwinism and pragmatism, explains how and why contemporary jurisprudence is so alien to the constitutionalism of the American Founders. To understand why today's courts rule the way they do, one must start with the ideas exposed by and explained in Watson's timely tome. Today's view--rooted in progressivism--is not simply that we have an interpretable Constitution, but that we have a Constitution which must be interpreted in light of "historically situated," continually evolving notions of the individual, the state, and society. This modern historical approach has been embraced by the judicial appointees of both Democratic and Republican presidents, by both liberals and conservatives, for a century or more. Living Constitution, Dying Faith shows how such an approach has directly undermined Americans' faith in a limited Constitution--as well as their faith in the eternal verities.
Author: John W. Compton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674419898
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
The New Deal is often said to represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a century of precedent to permit an expanded federal government, increased regulation of the economy, and eroded property protections. John Compton offers a surprising revision of this familiar narrative, showing that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants, not New Deal reformers, paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the twentieth century. Following the great religious revivals of the early 1800s, American evangelicals embarked on a crusade to eradicate immorality from national life by destroying the property that made it possible. Their cause represented a direct challenge to founding-era legal protections of sinful practices such as slavery, lottery gambling, and buying and selling liquor. Although evangelicals urged the judiciary to bend the rules of constitutional adjudication on behalf of moral reform, antebellum judges usually resisted their overtures. But after the Civil War, American jurists increasingly acquiesced in the destruction of property on moral grounds. In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other critics of laissez-faire constitutionalism used the judiciary’s acceptance of evangelical moral values to demonstrate that conceptions of property rights and federalism were fluid, socially constructed, and subject to modification by democratic majorities. The result was a progressive constitutional regime—rooted in evangelical Protestantism—that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth century.
Author: Darren Patrick Guerra
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739183869
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
He who can change the Constitution controls the Constitution. So who does control the Constitution? The answer has always been: “the people.” The people control the Constitution via the Article V amending process outlined in the Constitution itself. Changes can only be made through Article V and its formal procedures. Article V has always provided a means of perfecting the Constitution in an explicit, democratically authentic, prudent, and deliberative manner. In addition to changing the Constitution Article V also allowed the people to perfect and preserve their Constitution at the same time. In recent years Article V has come under attack by influential legal scholars who criticize it for being too difficult, undemocratic, and too formal. Such scholars advocate for ignoring Article V in favor of elite adaptation of the Constitution or popular amendment through national referendums. In making their case, critics also assume that Article V is an unimportant and expendable part of the Constitutional structure. One notable scholar called the Constitution “imbecilic” because of Article V. This book shows that, to the contrary, Article V is a unique and powerful extension of the American tradition of written constitutionalism. It was a logical extension of American constitutional development and it was a powerful tool used by the Federalists to argue for ratification of the new Constitution. Since then it has served as a means of “perfecting” the US Constitution for over 200 years via a wide range of amendments. Contrary to contemporary critics, the historical evidence shows Article V to be a vital element in the Constitutional architecture, not an expendable or ancillary piece. This book defends Article V against critics by showing that it is neither too difficult, undemocratic, nor too formal. Furthermore, a positive case is made that Article V remains the most clear and powerful way to register the sovereign desires of the American public with regard to alterations of their fundamental law. In the end, Article V is an essential bulwark to maintaining a written Constitution that secures the rights of the people against both elites and themselves.
Author: Bradley C. S. Watson
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268106991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
At its core this book is intellectual history, tracing the work of progressive historians as they in turn wrote the history of progressivism. In Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea, Bradley C. S. Watson presents an intellectual history of American progressivism as a philosophical-political phenomenon, focusing on how and with what consequences the academic discipline of history came to accept and propagate it. This book offers a meticulously detailed historiography and critique of the insularity and biases of academic culture. It shows how the first scholarly interpreters of progressivism were, in large measure, also its intellectual architects, and later interpreters were in deep sympathy with their premises and conclusions. Too many scholarly treatments of the progressive synthesis were products of it, or at least were insufficiently mindful of two central facts: the hostility of progressive theory to the Founders’ Constitution and the tension between progressive theory and the realm of the private, including even conscience itself. The constitutional and religious dimensions of progressive thought—and, in particular, the relationship between the two—remained hidden for much of the twentieth century. This pathbreaking volume reveals how and why this scholarly obfuscation occurred. The book will interest students and scholars of American political thought, the Progressive Era, and historiography, and it will be a useful reference work for anyone in history, law, and political science.
Author: Ralph Rossum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000124355
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 789
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Book Description
American Constitutional Law 11e, Volume I provides a comprehensive account of the nation's defining document, examining how its provisions were originally understood by those who drafted and ratified it, and how they have since been interpreted by the Supreme Court, Congress, the President, lower federal courts, and state judiciaries. Clear and accessible chapter introductions and a careful balance between classic and recent cases provide students with a sense of how the law has been understood and construed over the years. The 11th Edition has been fully revised to include several new cases, including Trump v. Hawaii (2018), in which Chief Justice Roberts held that Korematsu v. United States "has been overruled in the court of history"; Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (2018), in which Justice Alito’s majority opinion provides the most compelling argument to date against federal commandeering of state officials; and Sveen v. Melin (2018), a Contract Clause case that shows the Court’s continuing refusal to give a textualist reading of that provision, even in the face of Justice Gorsuch’s compelling and amusing dissent. A revamped and expanded companion website offers access to even more additional cases, an archive of primary documents, and links to online resources, making this text essential for any constitutional law course.
Author: Ralph A. Rossum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429975058
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 838
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Book Description
This book examines how the Constitution and its amendments not only grant the national and state governments sufficient power to control the governed but also oblige these governments to control themselves. It considers the distribution of power in the national government.
Author: Ralph Rossum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000074943
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1107
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Book Description
American Constitutional Law 11e, Volume II provides a comprehensive account of the nation's defining document, examining how its provisions were originally understood by those who drafted and ratified it, and how they have since been interpreted by the Supreme Court, Congress, the President, lower federal courts, and state judiciaries. Clear and accessible chapter introductions and a careful balance between classic and recent cases provide students with a sense of how the law has been understood and construed over the years. The 11th Edition now includes several landmark First Amendment cases, including Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (2018), Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (2018), National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Beccera (2018), Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017) and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018). It also includes Carpenter v. United States (2018). A revamped and expanded companion website offers access to even more additional cases, an archive of primary documents, and links to online resources, making this text essential for any constitutional law course.
Author: Chilton Williamson
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497620783
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
The End of Democracy? The fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Iron Curtain. The Orange Revolution. The Arab Spring. The rush of events in recent decades seems to confirm that Alexis de Tocqueville was right: the future belongs to democracy. But take a closer look. The history of democracy since the 1830s, when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, reveals a far more complicated picture. And the future, author Chilton Williamson Jr. demonstrates, appears rather unpromising for democratic institutions around the world. The fall of communism sparked the popular notion that the spread of democracy was inevitable. After Tocqueville challenges this sunny notion. Various aspects of twenty-first-century life that Tocqueville could scarcely have imagined—political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, technological, environmental—militate against democracy, both in developing societies and in the supposedly democratic West. This piercing, elegantly written book raises crucial questions about the future of democracy.
Author: Ralph A. Rossum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429975066
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1529
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Book Description
This book considers the distribution of power in the national government and explores how the constitutional scheme of separation of powers and checks and balances grants and controls power. It examines how the American Constitution and its amendments oblige the national and state governments.
