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"The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated the right to abortion and is revisiting other fundamental questions today--about voting rights, affirmative action, gun laws, and much more. Once-arcane theories of constitutional interpretation are profoundly affecting the lives of all Americans. In this brief and urgent book, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein provides a lively introduction to competing approaches to interpreting the Constitution--and...
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An essential resource for anyone interested in our nation's religious heritage and the Founders' intended role for the American judicial system. Original Intent combines hundreds of quotes from primary sources with the author's exposition on hot topics such as revisionism, judicial activism, and separation of church and state. A substantial appendix encompasses full texts of the founding documents, biographical sketches of numerous Founders, and extensive...
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"Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory's core tenet--that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning--has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the distant constitutional past. Yet originalist engagement with history is often deeply problematic. And now that a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court champion originalism, the task of scrutinizing originalists'...
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From the early days of the American republic, the nature of government "of the people, by the people, for the people" has been disputed. This is because there are not one but two very different notions of "We the People" and popular sovereignty, which yield competing schools of constitutional thought. The democrats view We the People collectively and think popular sovereignty resides in the people as a group. They view the Constitution as a living...
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"The Constitution is the most significant document in America. But do you fully understand what this valuable document means to you? In How to Read the Constitution--and Why, legal expert and educator Kimberly Wehle spells out in clear, simple, and common sense terms what is in the Constitution, and most importantly, what it means. In compelling terms and including text from the United States Constitution, she describes how the Constitution's protections...
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"From Illinois to Alabama, and from Florida to Utah, our laws and legal debates arise from distinctive local settings within our vast and varied nation. As the renowned scholar Akhil Amar explains, Abraham Lincoln's argument against the legality of succession can be traced to his Midwestern upbringing, just as a close look at the Florida legislature and state Supreme Court reveals the fundamental wrongness of the Bush v. Gore decision. Amar profiles...
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Originalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Three of the Supreme Court's nine justices explicitly embrace the originalist approach, as do increasing numbers of judges in the lower courts. Noted legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky gives a comprehensive analysis...
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"The New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically chronicles his hilarious adventures in attempting to follow the original meaning of the Constitution, as he searches for answers to one of the most pressing issues of our time: How should we interpret America's foundational document?"--
A.J. Jacobs learned the hard way that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket will earn you a lot of strange...
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This meticulously researched account of assaults on democracy by five presidents who imprisoned critics, spread a culture of white supremacy and committed crimes with impunity shows how citizens like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and Daniel Ellsberg fought back against presidential abuses of power.
"In this propulsive and eminently readable history, constitutional law and political science professor Corey Brettschneider provides a thoroughly researched...
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"Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of America's constitutional conversation during its first eighty years--from the Constitution's birth in 1760 through the 1830s, when the last of America's early leaders died. Amar traces the threads of Constitutional discourse, uniting history and law in a narrative that seeks both to reveal this history anew and to make clear who was right and who was wrong on the biggest legal issues confronting...
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"Many people have wondered why I've been speaking out on controversial issues for the last few years. They say I've never held political office. I'm not a constitutional scholar. I'm not even a lawyer. All I can say to that is 'Guilty as charged.' It's true that I've never voted for a budget America could not afford. I've never raised anyone's taxes. And I've never promised a lobbyist anything in exchange for a donation. Luckily, none of that really...
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Whitehead charts America's transition from a society governed by "we the people" to a police state governed by the strong arm of the law. In such an environment, the law becomes yet another tool to oppress the people, and the American people are in grave danger of losing their basic freedoms. He provides a call to action offering timely and practical initiatives for Americans to take charge of present course of history and stop the growing police...
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Gridlock! Gerrymandering! The Electoral college! How did our government get so complicated? As it turns out, many of the issues we struggle with today have their roots in the creation of the United States Constitution. Husband-and-wife team Cynthis Levinson and Sanford Levinson take us back to the beginnings of this document and show how these fault lines were first introduced - and how their unintended consequences continue to affect us today. The...
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"A revealing book about how government, law enforcement, and bureaucratic interests are seizing our property, our children, our savings, and our fundamental American rights--and how to fight back. Liberty and justice for all is the bedrock of American democracy, but has America betrayed our founders' vision for the nation? In When They Come For You, New York Times bestselling author David Kirby exposes federal, state, and local violations of basic...
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"When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written--the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that...
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"In 1987, E.L. Doctorow celebrated the Constitution's bicentennial by reading it. "It is five thousand words long but reads like fifty thousand," he said. Distinguished legal scholar Garrett Epps--himself an award-winning novelist--disagrees. It's about 7,500 words. And Doctorow "missed a good deal of high rhetoric, many literary tropes, and even a trace of, if not wit, at least irony," he writes. Americans may venerate the Constitution, "but all...
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