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Author: Leonard Williams Levy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1566633125
Category : Constitutional history
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
For years a debate has raged between those who would follow the intentions of the Founding Fathers and those who would continuously reinterpret the Constitution.
Author: Leonard Williams Levy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1566633125
Category : Constitutional history
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
For years a debate has raged between those who would follow the intentions of the Founding Fathers and those who would continuously reinterpret the Constitution.
Author: Harry V. Jaffa
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
A unique contribution to the debate over the original intentions of the Framers of the U.S. Constitutions.
Author: Joseph M. Lynch
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801472718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
No concept sparks more controversy in constitutional debate than "original intent." Offering a legal historian's approach to the subject, this book demonstrates that the framers deliberately obscured one of their more important decisions. Joseph M. Lynch argues that the Constitution was a product of political struggles involving regional interests, economic concerns, and ideology. The framers, he maintains, settled on enigmatic wording of the Necessary and Proper Clause and of the General Welfare provision in the Spending Clause as a compromise, leaving the extent of federal power to be determined by the political process. During ratification, however, attempts by dissident framers to undo the compromise were repelled in The Federalist: charges of overly broad congressional powers were met with protestations that in fact these powers were limited. Lynch describes how early lawmakers applied the Constitution to such issues as executive power and privilege, the deportation of aliens, and the prohibition of seditious speech. He follows the disputes over the interpretation of this document--focusing on James Madison's changing views--as the new government took shape and political parties were formed. Lynch points out that the first six Congresses and President George Washington disregarded the framers' intentions when they were deemed impractical to follow. In contrast, he warns that the version of original intent put forth in recent Supreme Court opinions regarding congressional power could hinder Congress in serving the nation.
Author: Melvin Eustace Bradford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780820315218
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
This persuasively argued, decidedly partisan work aims to recover the original United States Constitution by describing its genesis, ratification, and mandate from the perspectives of its original framers. Openly challenging contemporary orthodoxy, M. E. Bradford employs principles of legal, historical, rhetorical, and dramatic analysis to reveal a Constitution notably short on abstract principles and modest in any goal beyond limiting the powers of the government it authorizes. From the beginning of Original Intentions, two sharply divergent convictions about the Constitution emerge. Bradford, arguing from a nomocratic viewpoint, regards the Constitution as an essentially procedural text created expressly to detail how the government may preside over itself not its people. He decries the currently predominant teleologic view, which is based upon the "principles" embodied by the Constitution, and holds that the document was designed to achieve a certain kind of society. By this view, he says, our fundamental laws have been blanketed by a heavy layer of ad hoc solutions to problems they were never intended to address, and then further obscured by the melioristic meddlings of judges, legislators, lawyers, scholars, and journalists. Bradford first shows that the Constitutional convention of 1787 was an enterprise guided by the delegates' hesitancy to impose a higher order over their local, practical, and vastly differing interests. Though all the states would ratify the Constitution, he says, each would interpret it in unique ways. Bradford underscores the dearth of lofty idealism among the original framers by detailing British influences on their political ethos. British common law, on which the framers heavily relied, evolved from a tradition of deliberate responses to practical needs and circumstances, not deductions from abstract utopian designs. In light of these factors, Bradford examines the ratification debates of Massachusetts, South Carolina, and North Carolina - three states that together exemplified the vast range of interests to be accommodated by the Constitution. Next Bradford highlights classic teleologic distortions. Discussing religion and the first amendment, he establishes a pervasive commitment to Christianity among the framers and challenges our notions about the separation of church and state. Warning against anachronistic readings of the Constitution, Bradford also analyzes the rhetoric of the framers to reinforce our awareness of their desire for a government that would contain their multiplicities, not seek to resolve them. In a reading of the Reconstruction amendments (thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen) Bradford argues that they had only a modest impact on the Constitution's original design. By the misconstruction of these amendments, however, the Constitution has been transformed into "a purpose oriented blank check for redesigning American society." In a final chapter Bradford critiques Mortimer Adler's We Hold These Truths and repudiates any broad connection between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Before the Constitution is irreparably damaged, Bradford says, we must realize that it was not the best that the framers could invent but the best that their constituencies would approve. Debates related to normative issues should be settled not within the Constitution but within society, away from the coercive forces of law and politics - or else by amendment.
Author: Donald L. Drakeman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108485286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
The first major scholarly defense of the centrality of the Framers' intentions in constitutional interpretation to appear in years.
Author: Brion McClanahan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 162157072X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Are liberals right when they cite the “elastic” clauses of the Constitution to justify big government? Or are conservatives right when they cite the Constitution’s explicit limits on federal power? The answer lies in a more basic question: How did the founding generation intend for us to interpret and apply the Constitution? Professor Brion McClanahan, popular author of The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Founding Fathers, finds the answers by going directly to the source—to the Founding Fathers themselves, who debated all the relevant issues in their state constitutional conventions. In The Founding Fathers’ Guide to the Constitution, you’ll discover: How the Constitution was designed to protect rather than undermine the rights of States Why Congress, not the executive branch, was meant to be the dominant branch of government—and why the Founders would have argued for impeaching many modern presidents for violating the Constitution Why an expansive central government was the Founders’ biggest fear, and how the Constitution—and the Bill of Rights—was designed to guard against it Why the founding generation would regard most of the current federal budget—including “stimulus packages”—as unconstitutional Why the Founding Fathers would oppose attempts to “reform” the Electoral College Why the Founding Fathers would be horrified at the enormous authority of the Supreme Court, and why the Founders intended Congress, not the Court, to interpret federal law Authoritative, fascinating, and timely, The Founding Fathers’ Guide to the Constitution is the definitive layman’s guide to America’s most important—and often willfully misunderstood—historical document
Author: Jack N. Rakove
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307434516
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
From abortion to same-sex marriage, today's most urgent political debates will hinge on this two-part question: What did the United States Constitution originally mean and who now understands its meaning best? Rakove chronicles the Constitution from inception to ratification and, in doing so, traces its complex weave of ideology and interest, showing how this document has meant different things at different times to different groups of Americans.
Author: David Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199796297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
What were the Founding Fathers really thinking when they gathered in the Pennsylvania State House to draft the United States Constitution? This book explores this question and more. Organized thematically, each chapter covers a crucial Constitutional issue: the respective roles of the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature; the balance between the federal government and the states; slavery; and war and peace
Author: Lee J. Strang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108475639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Provides the first natural law justification for an originalist interpretation of the American Constitution.
Author: David A. Strauss
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199752539
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once remarked that the theory of an evolving, "living" Constitution effectively "rendered the Constitution useless." He wanted a "dead Constitution," he joked, arguing it must be interpreted as the framers originally understood it. In The Living Constitution, leading constitutional scholar David Strauss forcefully argues against the claims of Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, and other "originalists," explaining in clear, jargon-free English how the Constitution can sensibly evolve, without falling into the anything-goes flexibility caricatured by opponents. The living Constitution is not an out-of-touch liberal theory, Strauss further shows, but a mainstream tradition of American jurisprudence--a common-law approach to the Constitution, rooted in the written document but also based on precedent. Each generation has contributed precedents that guide and confine judicial rulings, yet allow us to meet the demands of today, not force us to follow the commands of the long-dead Founders. Strauss explores how judicial decisions adapted the Constitution's text (and contradicted original intent) to produce some of our most profound accomplishments: the end of racial segregation, the expansion of women's rights, and the freedom of speech. By contrast, originalism suffers from fatal flaws: the impossibility of truly divining original intent, the difficulty of adapting eighteenth-century understandings to the modern world, and the pointlessness of chaining ourselves to decisions made centuries ago. David Strauss is one of our leading authorities on Constitutional law--one with practical knowledge as well, having served as Assistant Solicitor General of the United States and argued eighteen cases before the United States Supreme Court. Now he offers a profound new understanding of how the Constitution can remain vital to life in the twenty-first century.
