Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court

Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court PDF Author: John M. Ferren
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876615
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Kentucky-born son of a Baptist preacher, with an early tendency toward racial prejudice, Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge (1894-1949) became one of the Court's leading liberal activists and an early supporter of racial equality, free speech, and church-state separation. Drawing on more than 160 interviews, John M. Ferren provides a valuable analysis of Rutledge's life and judicial decisionmaking and offers the most comprehensive explanation to date for the Supreme Court nominations of Rutledge, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas. Rutledge was known for his compassion and fairness. He opposed discrimination based on gender and poverty and pressed for expanded rights to counsel, due process, and federal review of state criminal convictions. During his brief tenure on the Court (he died following a stroke at age fifty-five), he contributed significantly to enhancing civil liberties and the rights of naturalized citizens and criminal defendants, became the Court's most coherent expositor of the commerce clause, and dissented powerfully from military commission convictions of Japanese generals after World War II. Through an examination of Rutledge's life, Ferren highlights the development of American common law and legal education, the growth of the legal profession and related institutions, and the evolution of the American court system, including the politics of judicial selection.

Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court

Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court PDF Author: John M. Ferren
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876615
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Kentucky-born son of a Baptist preacher, with an early tendency toward racial prejudice, Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge (1894-1949) became one of the Court's leading liberal activists and an early supporter of racial equality, free speech, and church-state separation. Drawing on more than 160 interviews, John M. Ferren provides a valuable analysis of Rutledge's life and judicial decisionmaking and offers the most comprehensive explanation to date for the Supreme Court nominations of Rutledge, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas. Rutledge was known for his compassion and fairness. He opposed discrimination based on gender and poverty and pressed for expanded rights to counsel, due process, and federal review of state criminal convictions. During his brief tenure on the Court (he died following a stroke at age fifty-five), he contributed significantly to enhancing civil liberties and the rights of naturalized citizens and criminal defendants, became the Court's most coherent expositor of the commerce clause, and dissented powerfully from military commission convictions of Japanese generals after World War II. Through an examination of Rutledge's life, Ferren highlights the development of American common law and legal education, the growth of the legal profession and related institutions, and the evolution of the American court system, including the politics of judicial selection.

Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England

Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England PDF Author: Dennis R. Klinck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317161947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
Judicial equity developed in England during the medieval period, providing an alternative access to justice for cases that the rigid structures of the common law could not accommodate. Where the common law was constrained by precedent and strict procedural and substantive rules, equity relied on principles of natural justice - or 'conscience' - to decide cases and right wrongs. Overseen by the Lord Chancellor, equity became one of the twin pillars of the English legal system with the Court of Chancery playing an ever greater role in the legal life of the nation. Yet, whilst the Chancery was commonly - and still sometimes is - referred to as a 'court of conscience', there is remarkably little consensus about what this actually means, or indeed whose conscience is under discussion. This study tackles the difficult subject of the place of conscience in the development of English equity during a crucial period of legal history. Addressing the notion of conscience as a juristic principle in the Court of Chancery during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the book explores how the concept was understood and how it figured in legal judgment. Drawing upon both legal and broader cultural materials, it explains how that understanding differed from modern notions and how it might have been more consistent with criteria we commonly associate with objective legal judgement than the modern, more 'subjective', concept of conscience. The study culminates with an examination of the chancellorship of Lord Nottingham (1673-82), who, because of his efforts to transform equity from a jurisdiction associated with discretion into one based on rules, is conventionally regarded as the father of modern, 'systematic' equity. From a broader perspective, this study can be seen as a contribution to the enduring discussion of the relationship between 'formal' accounts of law, which see it as systems of rules, and less formal accounts, which try to make room for intuitive moral or prudential reasoning.

The Conscience of the Constitution

The Conscience of the Constitution PDF Author: Timothy Sandefur
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 1939709040
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty documents a forgotten truth: the word “democracy” is nowhere to be found in either the Constitution or the Declaration. But it is the overemphasis of democracy by the legal community–rather than the primacy of liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence–that has led to the growth of government power at the expense of individual rights. Now, more than ever, Sandefur explains, the Declaration of Independence should set the framework for interpreting our fundamental law. In the very first sentence of the Constitution, the founding fathers stated unambiguously that “liberty” is a blessing. Today, more and more Americans are realizing that their individual freedoms are being threatened by the ever-expanding scope of the government. Americans have always differed over important political issues, but some things should not be settled by majority vote. In The Conscience of the Constitution, Timothy Sandefur presents a dramatic new challenge to the status quo of constitutional law.

Getting Justice and Getting Even

Getting Justice and Getting Even PDF Author: Sally Engle Merry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226520692
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ordinary Americans often bring family and neighborhood problems to court, seeking justice or revenge. The litigants in these local squabbles encounter law at its boundaries in the corridors of busy city courthouses, in the offices of court clerks, and in the church parlors used by mediation programs. Getting Justice and Getting Even concerns the legal consciousness of working class Americans and their experiences with court and mediation. Following cases into and through the courts, Sally Engle Merry provides an ethnographic study of local law and of the people who use it in a New England city. The litigants, primarily white, native-born, and working class, go to court because as part of mainstream America they feel entitled to use its legal system. Although neither powerful nor highly educated, they expect the law's support when they face intolerable infringements of their rights, privacy, and safety. Yet as personal problems enter the legal system and move through mediation sessions, clerk's hearings, and prosecutor's conferences, the citizen plaintiff rapidly loses control of the process. Court officials and mediators interpret and characterize the meaning of these experiences, reframing and categorizing them in different discourses. Some plaintiffs yield to these interpretations, but others resist, struggling to assert their own version of the problem. Ultimately, Merry exposes the paradox of legal entitlement. While going to court allows an individual to dominate domestic relationships, the litigant must increasingly yield control of the situation to the court that supplies that power.

Fathers of Conscience

Fathers of Conscience PDF Author: Bernie D. Jones
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820342300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law. Bernie D. Jones argues that these will contests indicated a struggle within the elite over race, gender, and class issues--over questions of social mores and who was truly family. Judges thus acted as umpires after a man's death, deciding whether to permit his attempts to provide for his slave partner and family. Her analysis of these differing judicial opinions on inheritance rights for slave partners makes an important contribution to the literature on the law of slavery in the United States.

The Conscience Wars

The Conscience Wars PDF Author: Michel Rosenfeld
Publisher:
ISBN: 1107173302
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 515

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the multifaceted debate on the interconnection between conscientious objections, religious liberty, and the equality of women and sexual minorities.

Shocking the Conscience

Shocking the Conscience PDF Author: Simeon Booker
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617037893
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
An unforgettable chronicle from a groundbreaking journalist who covered Emmett Till's murder, the Little Rock Nine, and ten US presidents

The Eyes of Asia

The Eyes of Asia PDF Author: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday, Page 1919.
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A series of letters purporting to be written by an East Indian officer wounded in France to his relatives at home." - New York Times Book Review, Oct. 20, 1918.

The Conscience of a Lawyer

The Conscience of a Lawyer PDF Author: David Mellinkoff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780314284020
Category : Defense (Criminal procedure)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
On trial practice, defense lawyers, and legal ethics, by discussing the murder of Lord William Russell in London, May 5, 1840, and a reconstruction of the trial of his valet, Benjamin François Courvoisier.

Shocking the Conscience of Humanity

Shocking the Conscience of Humanity PDF Author: Margaret M. DeGuzman
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198786158
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
The literature and jurisprudence of international criminal law relies on the claim that international crimes are exceptionally grave. They 'shock the conscience of humanity'. They are 'atrocities'. Yet what makes international crimes especially grave is rarely explained. Addressing the balance, Margaret DeGuzman explains what affect the historical occurrences that led to the heavy reliance on the concept of gravity, including the atrocities of the World War II era, and the crimes of Yugoslavia and Rwanda, had on international law. DeGuzman demonstrates how, in later decades, gravity has been used to obscure controversial value choices. This book looks to build the legitimacy of the international criminal law regime by exposing the value choices that the rhetoric of 'gravity' entails, and poses a new framework for assessing the legitimacy of international criminal law. Instead of solely relying on 'gravity', DeGuzman looks to wider values to ensure the continued legitimacy of international criminal law.