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Author: Akhil Reed Amar
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096360
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 816
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Book Description
A history of the American Constitution's formative decades from a preeminent legal scholar When the US Constitution won popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of thirty years of passionate argument over the nature of government. But ratification hardly ended the conversation. For the next half century, ordinary Americans and statesmen alike continued to wrestle with weighty questions in the halls of government and in the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be expanded? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? What rights should Indian nations hold? What was the proper role of the judicial branch? In The Words that Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.
Author: Akhil Reed Amar
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096360
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 816
Get Book Here
Book Description
A history of the American Constitution's formative decades from a preeminent legal scholar When the US Constitution won popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of thirty years of passionate argument over the nature of government. But ratification hardly ended the conversation. For the next half century, ordinary Americans and statesmen alike continued to wrestle with weighty questions in the halls of government and in the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be expanded? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? What rights should Indian nations hold? What was the proper role of the judicial branch? In The Words that Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.
Author: Julie E. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190246693
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
This work explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. It argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is changing in fundamental ways.
Author: Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190866063
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
When we think of constitutional law, we invariably think of the United States Supreme Court and the federal court system. Yet much of our constitutional law is not made at the federal level. In 51 Imperfect Solutions, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton argues that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in protecting individual liberties. The book tells four stories that arise in four different areas of constitutional law: equal protection; criminal procedure; privacy; and free speech and free exercise of religion. Traditional accounts of these bedrock debates about the relationship of the individual to the state focus on decisions of the United States Supreme Court. But these explanations tell just part of the story. The book corrects this omission by looking at each issue-and some others as well-through the lens of many constitutions, not one constitution; of many courts, not one court; and of all American judges, not federal or state judges. Taken together, the stories reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system, one that ought to make lawyers and litigants pause before reflexively assuming that the United States Supreme Court alone has all of the answers to the most vexing constitutional questions. If there is a central conviction of the book, it's that an underappreciation of state constitutional law has hurt state and federal law and has undermined the appropriate balance between state and federal courts in protecting individual liberty. In trying to correct this imbalance, the book also offers several ideas for reform.
Author: William N. Eskridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Current Events
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Third, same-sex marriage would help civilize America. A civilized polity assures equality for all its citizens. Without full access to the institutions of civic life, gays and lesbians cannot be full participants in the American experience. Gays and lesbians love their country, and have contributed in every way to its flourishing.
Author: Alison L. LaCroix
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674062035
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia. In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system. Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.
Author: Sanford Levinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195365577
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Levinson here argues that too many of our Constitution's provisions promote either unjust or ineffective government. Under the existing blueprint, we can neither rid ourselves of incompetent presidents nor assure continuity of government following catastrophic attacks. Worse, our Constitution is the most difficult to amend or update in the world. Levinson boldly challenges the Americans to undertake a long overdue public discussion on how they might best reform this most hallowed document and construct a constitution adequate to our democratic values.
Author: David Kennedy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186421
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 936
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Book Description
This anthology presents, for the first time, full texts of the twenty most important works of American legal thought since 1890. Drawing on a course the editors teach at Harvard Law School, the book traces the rise and evolution of a distinctly American form of legal reasoning. These are the articles that have made these authors--from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to Ronald Coase, from Ronald Dworkin to Catherine MacKinnon--among the most recognized names in American legal history. These authors proposed answers to the classic question: "What does it mean to think like a lawyer--an American lawyer?" Their answers differed, but taken together they form a powerful brief for the existence of a distinct and powerful style of reasoning--and of rulership. The legal mind is as often critical as constructive, however, and these texts form a canon of critical thinking, a toolbox for resisting and unravelling the arguments of the best legal minds. Each article is preceded by a short introduction highlighting the article's main ideas and situating it in the context of its author's broader intellectual projects, the scholarly debates of his or her time, and the reception the article received. Law students and their teachers will benefit from seeing these classic writings, in full, in the context of their original development. For lawyers, the collection will take them back to their best days in law school. All readers will be struck by the richness, the subtlety, and the sophistication with which so many of what have become the clichés of everyday legal argument were originally formulated.
Author: Anthea Roberts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190696419
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
This book challenges the idea that international law looks the same from anywhere in the world. Instead, how international lawyers understand and approach their field is often deeply influenced by the national contexts in which they lived, studied, and worked. International law in the United States and in the United Kingdom looks different compared to international law in China and Russia, though some approaches (particularly Western, Anglo-American ones) are more influential outside their borders than others. Given shifts in geopolitical power and the rise of non-Western powers like China, it is increasingly important for international lawyers to understand how others coming from diverse backgrounds approach the field. By examining the international law academies and textbooks of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Roberts provides a window into these different communities of international lawyers, and she uncovers some of the similarities and differences in how they understand and approach international law.
Author: George Fisher
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751353
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Though originally an interloper in a system of justice mediated by courtroom battles, plea bargaining now dominates American criminal justice. This book traces the evolution of plea bargaining from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its present pervasive role. Through the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, judges showed far less enthusiasm for plea bargaining than did prosecutors. After all, plea bargaining did not assure judges “victory”; judges did not suffer under the workload that prosecutors faced; and judges had principled objections to dickering for justice and to sharing sentencing authority with prosecutors. The revolution in tort law, however, brought on a flood of complex civil cases, which persuaded judges of the wisdom of efficient settlement of criminal cases. Having secured the patronage of both prosecutors and judges, plea bargaining quickly grew to be the dominant institution of American criminal procedure. Indeed, it is difficult to name a single innovation in criminal procedure during the last 150 years that has been incompatible with plea bargaining’s progress and survived.
Author: Judith Resnik
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300110960
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 719
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Book Description
A remnant of the Renaissance : the transnational iconography of justice -- Civic space, the public square, and good governance -- Obedience : the judge as the loyal servant of the state -- Of eyes and ostriches -- Why eyes? : color, blindness, and impartiality -- Representations and abstractions : identity, politics, and rights -- From seventeenth-century town halls to twentieth-century courts -- A building and litigation boom in Twentieth-Century federal courts -- Late Twentieth-Century United States courts : monumentality, security, and eclectic imagery -- Monuments to the present and museums of the past : national courts (and prisons) -- Constructing regional rights -- Multi-jurisdictional premises : from peace to crimes -- From "rites" to "rights" -- Courts : in and out of sight, site, and cite -- An iconography for democratic adjudication.
