The Constitution of Risk

The Constitution of Risk PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043727
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Constitution of Risk is the first book to combine constitutional theory with the theory of risk regulation. The book argues that constitutional rulemaking is best understood as a means of managing political risks. Constitutional law structures and regulates the risks that arise in and from political life, such as an executive coup or military putsch, political abuse of ideological or ethnic minorities, or corrupt self-dealing by officials. The book claims that the best way to manage political risks is an approach it calls "optimizing constitutionalism" - in contrast to the worst-case thinking that underpins "precautionary constitutionalism," a mainstay of liberal constitutional theory. Drawing on a broad range of disciplines such as decision theory, game theory, welfare economics, political science, and psychology, this book advocates constitutional rulemaking undertaken in a spirit of welfare maximization, and offers a corrective to the pervasive and frequently irrational attitude of distrust of official power that is so prominent in American constitutional history and discourse.

The Constitution of Risk

The Constitution of Risk PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043727
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Constitution of Risk is the first book to combine constitutional theory with the theory of risk regulation. The book argues that constitutional rulemaking is best understood as a means of managing political risks. Constitutional law structures and regulates the risks that arise in and from political life, such as an executive coup or military putsch, political abuse of ideological or ethnic minorities, or corrupt self-dealing by officials. The book claims that the best way to manage political risks is an approach it calls "optimizing constitutionalism" - in contrast to the worst-case thinking that underpins "precautionary constitutionalism," a mainstay of liberal constitutional theory. Drawing on a broad range of disciplines such as decision theory, game theory, welfare economics, political science, and psychology, this book advocates constitutional rulemaking undertaken in a spirit of welfare maximization, and offers a corrective to the pervasive and frequently irrational attitude of distrust of official power that is so prominent in American constitutional history and discourse.

The Schoolhouse Gate

The Schoolhouse Gate PDF Author: Justin Driver
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525566961
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago (who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school stu­dents, which have so often been undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades. Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to un­authorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compul­sory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer—these are but a few of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation. Justin Driver maintains that since the 1970s the Supreme Court has regularly abdicated its responsibility for protecting students’ constitutional rights and risked trans­forming public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court’s decisions in recent decades would conclude that the following actions taken by educators pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporal punishment on students without any proce­dural protections, searching students and their possessions without probable cause in bids to uncover violations of school rules, random drug testing of students who are not suspected of wrongdoing, and suppressing student speech for the view­point it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have upheld a wide array of dubious school actions, including degrading strip searches, repressive dress codes, draconian “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies, and severe restrictions on off-campus speech. Driver surveys this legal landscape with eloquence, highlights the gripping personal narratives behind landmark clashes, and warns that the repeated failure to honor students’ rights threatens our basic constitutional order. This magiste­rial book will make it impossible to view American schools—or America itself—in the same way again.

Risk vs. Risk

Risk vs. Risk PDF Author: John D. Graham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037871
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
We see the stories in the newspaper nearly every day: a drug hailed as a breakthrough treatment turns out to cause harmful side effects; controls implemented to reduce air pollution are shown to generate hazardous solid waste; bans on dangerous chemicals result in the introduction of even more risky substitutes. Could our efforts to protect our health and the environment actually be making things worse? In Risk versus Risk, John D. Graham, Jonathan Baert Wiener, and their colleagues at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis marshal an impressive set of case studies which demonstrate that all too often our nation's campaign to reduce risks to our health and the environment is at war with itself.

The Constitution in Jeopardy

The Constitution in Jeopardy PDF Author: Russ Feingold
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541701542
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
A former U.S. senator joins a legal scholar to examine a hushed effort to radically change our Constitution, offering a warning and a way forward. Over the last two decades, a fringe plan to call a convention under the Constitution's amendment mechanism—the nation's first ever—has inched through statehouses. Delegates, like those in Philadelphia two centuries ago, would exercise nearly unlimited authority to draft changes to our fundamental law, potentially altering anything from voting and free speech rights to regulatory and foreign policy powers. Such a watershed moment would present great danger, and for some, great power. In this important book, Feingold and Prindiville distill extensive legal and historical research and examine the grave risks inherent in this effort. But they also consider the role of constitutional amendment in modern life. Though many focus solely on judicial and electoral avenues for change, such an approach is at odds with a cornerstone ideal of the Founding: that the People make constitutional law, directly. In an era defined by faction and rejection of long-held norms, The Constitution in Jeopardy examines the nature of constitutional change and asks urgent questions about what American democracy is, and should be.

Privacy at Risk

Privacy at Risk PDF Author: Christopher Slobogin
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459627067
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 606

Get Book Here

Book Description
Without our consent and often without our knowledge, the government can constantly monitor many of our daily activities, using closed circuit TV, global positioning systems, and a wide array of other sophisticated technologies. With just a few keystrokes, records containing our financial information, phone and e - mail logs, and sometimes even o...

Law’s Abnegation

Law’s Abnegation PDF Author: Adrian Vermeule
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974719
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ronald Dworkin once imagined law as an empire and judges as its princes. But over time, the arc of law has bent steadily toward deference to the administrative state. Adrian Vermeule argues that law has freely abandoned its imperial pretensions, and has done so for internal legal reasons. In area after area, judges and lawyers, working out the logical implications of legal principles, have come to believe that administrators should be granted broad leeway to set policy, determine facts, interpret ambiguous statutes, and even define the boundaries of their own jurisdiction. Agencies have greater democratic legitimacy and technical competence to confront many issues than lawyers and judges do. And as the questions confronting the state involving climate change, terrorism, and biotechnology (to name a few) have become ever more complex, legal logic increasingly indicates that abnegation is the wisest course of action. As Law’s Abnegation makes clear, the state did not shove law out of the way. The judiciary voluntarily relegated itself to the margins of power. The last and greatest triumph of legalism was to depose itself.

Law and Leviathan

Law and Leviathan PDF Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674247531
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

The Founders' Key

The Founders' Key PDF Author: Larry P. Arnn
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 1595554734
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today the integrity and unity of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are under attack by the Progressive political movement. And yet, writes Larry P. Arnn: “The words of the Declaration of Independence ring across the ages. The arrangements of the Constitution have a way of organizing our actions so as to produce certain desirable results, and they have done this more reliably than any governing instrument in the history of man. Connect these arrangements to the beauty of the Declaration and one has something inspiring and commanding.” From Chapter 2, The Founders’ Key Dr. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, reveals this integral unity of the Declaration and the Constitution. Together, they form the pillars upon which the liberties and rights of the American people stand. United, they have guided history’s first self-governing nation, forming our government under certain universal and eternal principles. Unfortunately, the effort to redefine government to reflect “the changing and growing social order” has gone very far toward success. Politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt found ways to condemn and discard the Constitution and to redefine the Declaration to justify government without limit. As a result, both documents have been weakened, their influence diminished, and their meaning obscured—paving the way for the modern administrative state, unaccountable to the will of the people. The Founders’ Key is a powerful call to rediscover the connection between these two mighty documents, and thereby restore our political faith and revive our free institutions.

A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence

A Framework of Intersectional Risk Theory in the Age of Ambivalence PDF Author: Katarina Giritli Nygren
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030335240
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book brings feminist theories and concepts to the sociology of risk in an attempt to carve out a framework for intersectional risk theories in times of ambivalence. The authors purport that risk is pervasive in the Global North, and is fast becoming a hegemonic governing principle. In order to understand this crucial aspect of society, sociological risk theories and risk analysis must go beyond power and social inequalities, to incorporate an intersectional risk approach that takes into account gender, race and other critical perspectives. Their proposed framework will provide the tools to assess how risk is situated in different configurations of power, revealing cracks and openings in the weft of power and rethinking risk governance in contemporary society. By utilising an intersectional and nuanced analysis, the everyday understanding, practices and discourses of risk can be explored and better understood. This book will be of interest to scholars and students who value the importance of establishing interdisciplinary networks between risk theory, sociology, politics and more in order to study the contemporary world.

Constitutional Redemption

Constitutional Redemption PDF Author: J. M. Balkin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674058747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Political constitutions are compromises with injustice. What makes the U.S. Constitution legitimate is Americans’ faith that the constitutional system can be made “a more perfect union.” Balkin argues that the American constitutional project is based in hope and a narrative of shared redemption, and its destiny is still over the horizon.