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Author: Tinsley E. Yarbrough
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195146034
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Thoughtful, wide-ranging, and intelligently written, this volume is an insightful look at the Rehnquist Court and its impact on law and American life.
Author: Tinsley E. Yarbrough
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195146034
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Thoughtful, wide-ranging, and intelligently written, this volume is an insightful look at the Rehnquist Court and its impact on law and American life.
Author: Mark V. Tushnet
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393058680
Category : Constitutional law
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
In this authoritative reckoning with the eighteen-year record of the Rehnquist Court, Georgetown law professor Mark Tushnet reveals how the decisions of nine deeply divided justices have left the future of the Court; and the nation; hanging in the balance. Many have assumed that the chasm on the Court has been between its liberals and its conservatives. In reality, the division was between those in tune with the modern post-Reagan Republican Party and those who, though considered to be in the Court's center, represent an older Republican tradition. As a result, the Court has modestly promoted the agenda of today's economic conservatives, but has regularly defeated the agenda of social issues conservatives; while paving the way for more radically conservative path in the future.
Author: Steven T. Seitz
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498568831
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution at a level sufficiently general to guide lawmaking while avoiding great detail. This four-page document has guided the United States of America for more than two centuries. The Supreme Court has parsed the document into clauses, which plaintiffs and defendants invoke in cases or controversies before the Court. Some, like the Interstate Commerce Clause, are central to the survival of a government of multiple sovereignties. The practice of observing case precedents allows orderly development of the law and consistent direction to the lower courts. The Court itself claimed the final power of judicial review, despite efforts to the contrary by the executive and legislative branches of the national government and the state supreme courts. The Court then limited its own awesome power through a series of self-imposed rules of justiciability. These rules set the conditions under which the Court may exercise the extraordinary final power of judicial review. Some of these self-imposed limits are prudential, some logical, and some inviting periodic revision. This book examines the detailed unfolding of several Constitutional clauses and the rules of justiciability. For each clause and each rule of justiciability, the book begins with the brilliant foundations laid by Chief Justice John Marshall, then to the anti-Federalist era, the Civil War, the dominance of laissez faire and social Darwinism, the Great Depression redirection, the civil rights era, and finally the often-hapless efforts of Chief Justice Rehnquist.
Author: Christopher P. Banks
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742535045
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
Constitutional scholars Christopher P. Banks and John C. Blakeman offer the most current and the first book-length study of the U.S. Supreme Court's "new federalism" begun by the Rehnquist Court and now flourishing under Chief Justice John Roberts. While the Rehnquist Court reinvorgorated new federalism by protecting state sovereignty and set new constitutional limits on federal power, Banks and Blakeman show that in the Roberts Court new federalism continues to evolve in a docket increasingly attentive to statutory construction, preemption, and business litigation
Author: Peter H. Irons
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
We see these two men serving together for two momentous decades, the leaders of the Court's liberal and conservative factions. We come to know them, their characters, their personalities, their beliefs.
Author: Andrew Coan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986954
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking analysis of Supreme Court decision-making, Andrew Coan explains how judicial caseload shapes the course of American constitutional law and the role of the Court in American society. Compared with the vast machinery surrounding Congress and the president, the Supreme Court is a tiny institution that can resolve only a small fraction of the constitutional issues that arise in any given year. Rationing the Constitution shows that this simple yet frequently ignored fact is essential to understanding how the Supreme Court makes constitutional law. Due to the structural organization of the judiciary and certain widely shared professional norms, the capacity of the Supreme Court to review lower-court decisions is severely limited. From this fact, Andrew Coan develops a novel and arresting theory of Supreme Court decision-making. In deciding cases, the Court must not invite more litigation than it can handle. On many of the most important constitutional questions—touching on federalism, the separation of powers, and individual rights—this constraint creates a strong pressure to adopt hard-edged categorical rules, or defer to the political process, or both. The implications for U.S. constitutional law are profound. Lawyers, academics, and social activists pursuing social reform through the courts must consider whether their goals can be accomplished within the constraints of judicial capacity. Often the answer will be no. The limits of judicial capacity also substantially constrain the Court’s much touted—and frequently lamented—power to overrule democratic majorities. As Rationing the Constitution demonstrates, the Supreme Court is David, not Goliath.
Author: Thomas M. Keck
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226428869
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
When conservatives took control of the federal judiciary in the 1980s, it was widely assumed that they would reverse the landmark rights-protecting precedents set by the Warren Court and replace them with a broad commitment to judicial restraint. Instead, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist has reaffirmed most of those liberal decisions while creating its own brand of conservative judicial activism. Ranging from 1937 to the present, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History traces the legal and political forces that have shaped the modern Court. Thomas M. Keck argues that the tensions within modern conservatism have produced a court that exercises its own power quite actively, on behalf of both liberal and conservative ends. Despite the long-standing conservative commitment to restraint, the justices of the Rehnquist Court have stepped in to settle divisive political conflicts over abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, presidential elections, and much more. Keck focuses in particular on the role of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, whose deciding votes have shaped this uncharacteristically activist Court.
Author: Kenneth W. Starr
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0446554162
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
Today's United States Supreme Court consists of nine intriguingly varied justices and one overwhelming contradiction: Compared to its revolutionary predecessor, the Rehnquist Court appears deceptively passive, yet it stands as dramatically ready to defy convention as the Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s. Now Kenneth W. Starr-who served as clerk for one chief justice, argued twenty-five cases as solicitor general before the Supreme Court, and is widely regarded as one of the nation's most distinguished practitioners of constitutional law-offers us an incisive and unprecedented look at the paradoxes, the power, and the people of the highest court in the land. In First Among Equals Ken Starr traces the evolution of the Supreme Court from its beginnings, examines major Court decisions of the past three decades, and uncovers the sometimes surprising continuity between the precedent-shattering Warren Court and its successors under Burger and Rehnquist. He shows us, as no other author ever has, the very human justices who shape our law, from Sandra Day O'Connor, the Court's most pivotal-and perhaps most powerful-player, to Clarence Thomas, its most original thinker. And he explores the present Court's evolution into a lawyerly tribunal dedicated to balance and consensus on the one hand, and zealous debate on hotly contested issues of social policy on the other. On race, the Court overturned affirmative action and held firm to an undeviating color-blind standard. On executive privilege, the Court rebuffed three presidents, both Republican and Democrat, who fought to increase their power at the expense of rival branches of government. On the 2000 presidential election, the Court prevented what it deemed a runaway Florida court from riding roughshod over state law-illustrating how in our system of government, the Supreme Court is truly the first among equals. Compelling and supremely readable, First Among Equals sheds new light on the most frequently misunderstood legal pillar of American life.
Author: Robert A. Williams
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452907560
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Robert A. Williams Jr. boldly exposes the ongoing legal force of the racist language directed at Indians in American society. Fueled by well-known negative racial stereotypes of Indian savagery and cultural inferiority, this language, Williams contends, has functioned “like a loaded weapon” in the Supreme Court’s Indian law decisions. Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshall’s foundational opinions in the early nineteenth century and continuing today in the judgments of the Rehnquist Court, Williams shows how undeniably racist language and precedent are still used in Indian law to justify the denial of important rights of property, self-government, and cultural survival to Indians. Building on the insights of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Frantz Fanon, Williams argues that racist language has been employed by the courts to legalize a uniquely American form of racial dictatorship over Indian tribes by the U.S. government. Williams concludes with a revolutionary proposal for reimagining the rights of American Indians in international law, as well as strategies for compelling the current Supreme Court to confront the racist origins of Indian law and for challenging bigoted ways of talking, thinking, and writing about American Indians. Robert A. Williams Jr. is professor of law and American Indian studies at the James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona. A member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, he is author of The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest and coauthor of Federal Indian Law.
Author: Erwin Chemerinsky
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451606354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Over the last few decades, the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts have undergone a dramatic shift to the right, the result of a determined effort by right-wing lawmakers and presidents to reinterpret the Constitution by reshaping the judiciary. Conservative activist justices have narrowed the scope of the Constitution, denying its protections to millions of Americans, exactly as the lawmakers who appointed and confirmed these jurists intended. Basic long-standing principles of constitutional law have been overturned by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts. As distinguished law professor and constitutional expert Erwin Chemerinsky demonstrates in this invaluable book, these changes affect the lives of every American. As a result of political pressure from conservatives and a series of Supreme Court decisions, our public schools are increasingly separate and unequal, to the great disadvantage of poor and minority students. Right-wing politicians and justices are dismantling the wall separating church and state, allowing ever greater government support for religion. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, absurdly harsh sentences are being handed down to criminal defendants, such as life sentences for shoplifting and other petty offenses. Even in death penalty cases, defendants are being denied the right to competent counsel at trial, and as a result innocent people have been convicted and sentenced to death. Right-wing politicians complain that government is too big and intrusive while at the same time they are only too happy to insert the government into the most intimate aspects of the private lives of citizens when doing so conforms to conservative morality. Conservative activist judges say that the Constitution gives people an inherent right to own firearms but not to make their own medical decisions. In some states it is easier to buy an assault rifle than to obtain an abortion. Nowhere has the conservative assault on the Constitution been more visible or more successful than in redefining the role of the president. From Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, conservatives have sought to significantly increase presidential power. The result in recent years has been unprecedented abuses, including indefinite detentions, illegal surveillance, and torture of innocent people. Finally, access to the courts is being restricted by new rulings that deny legal protections to ordinary Americans. Fewer lawsuits alleging discrimination in employment are heard; fewer people are able to sue corporations or governments for injuries they have suffered; and even when these cases do go to trial, new restrictions limit damages that plaintiffs can collect. The first step in reclaiming the protections of the Constitution, says Chemerinsky, is to recognize that right-wing justices are imposing their personal prejudices, not making neutral decisions about the scope of the Constitution, as they claim, or following the "original meaning" of the Constitution. Only then do we stand a chance of reclaiming our constitutional liberties from a rigid ideological campaign that has transformed our courts and our laws. Only then can we return to a constitutional law that advances freedom and equality.
