Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Americas Unwritten Constitution
Download Americas Unwritten Constitution full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Americas Unwritten Constitution ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis America's Unwritten Constitution by : Akhil Reed Amar
Download or read book America's Unwritten Constitution written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading between the lines: America's implicit Constitution -- Heeding the deed: America's enacted Constitution -- Hearing the people: America's lived Constitution -- Confronting modern case law: America's "warrented" Constitution -- Putting precedent in its place: America's doctrinal Constitution -- Honoring the icons: America's symbolic Constitution -- "Remembering the ladies" : America's feminist Constitution -- Following Washington's lead: America's "Georgian" Constitution -- Interpreting government practices: America's institutional Constitution -- Joining the party: America's partisan Constitution -- Doing the right thing: America's conscientious Constitution -- Envisioning the future: America's unfinished Constitution -- Afterward -- Appendix: America's written Constitution.
Book Synopsis America's Constitution by : Akhil Reed Amar
Download or read book America's Constitution written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In America’s Constitution, one of this era’s most accomplished constitutional law scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, gives the first comprehensive account of one of the world’s great political texts. Incisive, entertaining, and occasionally controversial, this “biography” of America’s framing document explains not only what the Constitution says but also why the Constitution says it. We all know this much: the Constitution is neither immutable nor perfect. Amar shows us how the story of this one relatively compact document reflects the story of America more generally. (For example, much of the Constitution, including the glorious-sounding “We the People,” was lifted from existing American legal texts, including early state constitutions.) In short, the Constitution was as much a product of its environment as it was a product of its individual creators’ inspired genius. Despite the Constitution’s flaws, its role in guiding our republic has been nothing short of amazing. Skillfully placing the document in the context of late-eighteenth-century American politics, America’s Constitution explains, for instance, whether there is anything in the Constitution that is unamendable; the reason America adopted an electoral college; why a president must be at least thirty-five years old; and why–for now, at least–only those citizens who were born under the American flag can become president. From his unique perspective, Amar also gives us unconventional wisdom about the Constitution and its significance throughout the nation’s history. For one thing, we see that the Constitution has been far more democratic than is conventionally understood. Even though the document was drafted by white landholders, a remarkably large number of citizens (by the standards of 1787) were allowed to vote up or down on it, and the document’s later amendments eventually extended the vote to virtually all Americans. We also learn that the Founders’ Constitution was far more slavocratic than many would acknowledge: the “three fifths” clause gave the South extra political clout for every slave it owned or acquired. As a result, slaveholding Virginians held the presidency all but four of the Republic’s first thirty-six years, and proslavery forces eventually came to dominate much of the federal government prior to Lincoln’s election. Ambitious, even-handed, eminently accessible, and often surprising, America’s Constitution is an indispensable work, bound to become a standard reference for any student of history and all citizens of the United States.
Book Synopsis The Words That Made Us by : Akhil Reed Amar
Download or read book The Words That Made Us written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Constitution Today by : Akhil Reed Amar
Download or read book The Constitution Today written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading legal scholar addresses the most important constitutional controversies of the past two decades and illuminates the Constitution's spirit and ongoing relevance America's Constitution, Chief Justice John Marshall famously observed in McCulloch v. Maryland, aspires "to endure for ages to come." The daily news has a shorter shelf life, and when the issues of the day involve momentous constitutional questions, present-minded journalists and busy citizens cannot always see the stakes clearly. In The Constitution Today, Akhil Reed Amar, America's preeminent constitutional scholar, considers the biggest and most bitterly contested debates of the last two decades and provides a passionate handbook for thinking constitutionally about today's headlines. Amar shows how the Constitution's text, history, and structure are a crucial repository of collective wisdom, providing specific rules and grand themes relevant to every organ of the American body politic. Prioritizing sound constitutional reasoning over partisan preferences, he makes the case for diversity-based affirmative action and a right to have a gun in one's home for self-protection, and against spending caps on independent political advertising and bans on same-sex marriage. He explains what's wrong with presidential dynasties, advocates a "nuclear option" to restore majority rule in the Senate, and suggests ways to reform the Supreme Court. And he revisits three dramatic constitutional conflicts -- the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the contested election of George W. Bush, and the fight over Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act -- to show what politicians, judges, and journalists got right as events unfolded and what they missed. Leading readers through the particular constitutional questions at stake in each episode while outlining his abiding views regarding the Constitution's letter, its spirit, and the direction constitutional law must go, Amar offers an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand America's Constitution and its relevance today.
Book Synopsis America's Unwritten Constitution by : Don Krasher Price
Download or read book America's Unwritten Constitution written by Don Krasher Price and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don K. Price seeks the cause of the nation's inability to develop coherent policies and manage consistent programs and finds it in American attitudes toward authority. This country's managerial disarray can be traced to religious and philosophical roots of our informal system of government and its development. Price shows how a native American skepticism toward all establishments, combined with a belief in the role of science as advancing progress, has given us a moralistic, reformist view of government that rejects compromise even for the sake of coherence and continuity. This is unlike the experience of Great Britain and Canada, which he relates in a series of incisive comparisons.
Download or read book Courts and Congress written by Quirk and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Its often said, confirmed by survey data, that the American people are losing confidence in their government. But the problem may be the reverse-the government has lost confidence in the people. Increasingly the power to make decisions in our democracy has been shifted from Congress to the court system, forcing non-elected officials to make decisions that affect the lives of Americans. In a society which is based on the democratic elections of its officials, this is clearly backwards. Quirk maintains that what he calls the Happy Convention, an informal and unwritten rearrangement of "passing the buck" of government powers, is done to avoid blame and approval ratings becoming lower for a particular person or party. For example, the Happy Convention assigns the power to declare and make war to the president. Congress and the court play a supporting role-Congress, when requested, gives the president a blank check to use force-the Court throws out any challenges to the legality of the war. Everyone wins if the war avoids disaster. If it turns out badly, the president is held accountable. His ratings fall, reelection is out of the question, congressmen say he lied to them; his party is likely to lose the next election. In this way, Quirk reminds us that the Happy Convention is not what the Founders intended for us. For democracy to work properly, the American people have to know what options they have. Courts and Congress assigns vast power, even the power to decide presidential elections-to the Imperial Court. The Founders, if you brought them back today would at least recognize the Congress and the president. They would be astounded to read that the courts are in actual peril. They would even less likely understand that the courts are on the ballot. The founders would not appreciate subjecting the judiciary to such partisan political rule; nor claims William Quirk, should it be.
Book Synopsis The (un)Written Constitution by : George Thomas
Download or read book The (un)Written Constitution written by George Thomas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The late Justice Scalia relished pointing to departures from text as departures from the Constitution, but in fact his jurisprudence relied on unwritten ideas. As textualism has become more prominent with the elevation of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court-jurists in the mold of Scalia-it is crucial to reveal the unwritten ideas that drive textualist readings of the Constitution. Our deepest debates about America's written Constitution are not about constitutional text, but about the unwritten ideas and understandings that guide our reading of text. This fact is obscured by the public understanding of textualism and originalism as put forward by its most prominent judicial advocates. The (Un)Written Constitution makes these ideas visible by turning to the practices of Supreme Court justices and political actors in interpreting the Constitution over more than two centuries. From founding debates about freedom of speech and religion to contemporary arguments about judicial review, the separation of powers, same-sex marriage, and partisan gerrymandering, this work highlights the too often unacknowledged ideas that animate our debates about the written Constitution. Contrary to textual jurists, these recurrent debates are not about whether to follow the text; they are disputes about what fidelity to the text requires. How do we weigh and balance different textual provisions and see them as part of a constitutional whole? The text does not answer such questions. This book illustrates that moving beyond the text is an inescapable feature of interpreting America's written Constitution"--
Book Synopsis America's Fiscal Constitution by : Bill White
Download or read book America's Fiscal Constitution written by Bill White and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Truman, and Eisenhower have done about today's federal debt crisis? America's Fiscal Constitution tells the remarkable story of fiscal heroes who imposed clear limits on the use of federal debt, limits that for two centuries were part of an unwritten constitution. Those national leaders borrowed only for extraordinary purposes and relied on well-defined budget practices to balance federal spending and revenues. That traditional fiscal constitution collapsed in 2001. Afterward -- for the first time in history -- federal elected officials cut taxes during war, funded permanent new programs entirely with debt, grew dependent on foreign creditors, and claimed that the economy could not thrive without routine federal borrowing. For most of the nation's history, conservatives fought to restrain the growth of government by insisting that new programs be paid for with taxation, while progressives sought to preserve opportunities for people on the way up by balancing budgets. Virtually all mainstream politicians recognized that excessive debt could jeopardize private investment and national independence. With original scholarship and the benefit of experience in finance and public service, Bill White dispels common budget myths and distills practical lessons from the nation's five previous spikes in debt. America's Fiscal Constitution offers an objective and hopeful guide for people trying to make sense of the nation's current, most severe, debt crisis and its impact on their lives and our future.
Book Synopsis A Constitution in Full by : Peter Augustine Lawler
Download or read book A Constitution in Full written by Peter Augustine Lawler and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When political debates devolve, as they often do these days, into a contest between big-government progressivism and natural rights individualism, Americans tend to appeal to the “self-evident” truths inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But Peter Lawler and Richard Reinsch remind us that these truths understood in the abstract are untethered from a prior, unwritten constitution presupposed by the Framers—one found in culture, customs, traditions, experiences, and beliefs. A Constitution in Full is Lawler and Reinsch’s attempt to return this critical context to US constitutionalism—to recover a political sense of individualism in relation to country, family, religious community, and nature. Power, the authors suggest, is a public trust, not a form of obedience to either majoritarian suppression of particular liberties or the endless rights-claims lodged by autonomous individuals against society. Instead, power is ordered to the demands of a shared political enterprise that emerges from man’s social nature. Building on political insights from Alexis de Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, John Courtney Murray, and others Lawler and Reinsch seek to restore the relational person—the individual grounded in family, work, faith, and community—to a central place in our understanding of republican constitutionalism. Their work promotes the ongoing development of constitutional self-government rooted in our historical, legal, and religious foundations. The shared middle-class values that once united almost all Americans as well as any confidence in democratic deliberation or political liberty are rapidly atrophying. This book aims to rebuild this confidence by helping us think seriously about the complex interplay between political and economic liberties and the relational life of creatures and citizens.
Book Synopsis The Constitution and Criminal Procedure by : Akhil Reed Amar
Download or read book The Constitution and Criminal Procedure written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the banner of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, the Supreme Court of America has constitutionalized vast areas of criminal procedure law in ways that often reward the guilty whilst hurting the innocent. This book reconceptualizes the basic foundations of the criminal procedure field.
Book Synopsis Courts and Congress by : William Quirk
Download or read book Courts and Congress written by William Quirk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's often said, confirmed by survey data, that the American people are losing confidence in their government. But the problem may be the reverse--the government has lost confidence in the people. Increasingly the power to make decisions in our democracy has been shifted from Congress to the court system, forcing non-elected officials to make decisions which affect the lives of Americans. In a society which is based on the democratic elections of its officials, this is clearly backwards. Quirk maintains that what he calls "The Happy Convention," an informal and unwritten rearrangement of "passing the buck" of government powers, is done to avoid blame and approval ratings becoming lower for a particular person or party. For example, The Happy Convention assigns the power to declare and make war to the President. Congress and the Court play a supporting role--Congress, when requested, gives the President a blank check to use force--the Court throws out any challenges to the legality of the war. Everyone wins if the war avoids disaster. If it turns out badly, the President is held accountable. His ratings fall, reelection is out of the question, congressmen say he lied to them; his Party is likely to lose the next election. In this way, Quirk reminds us that The Happy Convention is not what the Founders intended for us. For democracy to work properly, the American people have to know what options they have. Courts and Congress argues the case for reestablishing the balance of powers between the courts, the Congress, and the Presidency.
Book Synopsis The Constitution of the United States of America by : Mark Tushnet
Download or read book The Constitution of the United States of America written by Mark Tushnet and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second edition of Professor Tushnet's short critical introduction to the history and current meaning of the United States' Constitution. It is organised around wo themes: first, the US Constitution is old, short, and difficult to amend. Second, the Constitution creates a structure of political opportunities that allows political actors, icluding political parties, to pursue the preferred policy goals even to the point of altering the very structure of politics. Deploying these themes to examine the structure f the national government, federalism, judicial review, and individual rights, the book provides basic information about, and deeper insights into, the way he US constitutional system has developed and what it means today.
Book Synopsis The Bill of Rights by : Akhil Reed Amar
Download or read book The Bill of Rights written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the deep insights of Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Felix Frankfurter that have defined our cherished Bill of Rights fatally flawed? With meticulous historical scholarship and elegant legal interpretation a leading scholar of Constitutional law boldly answers yes as he explodes conventional wisdom about the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution in this incisive new account of our most basic charter of liberty. Akhil Reed Amar brilliantly illuminates in rich detail not simply the text, structure, and history of individual clauses of the 1789 Bill, but their intended relationships to each other and to other constitutional provisions. Amar's corrective does not end there, however, for as his powerful narrative proves, a later generation of antislavery activists profoundly changed the meaning of the Bill in the Reconstruction era. With the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans underwent a new birth of freedom that transformed the old Bill of Rights. We have as a result a complex historical document originally designed to protect the people against self-interested government and revised by the Fourteenth Amendment to guard minority against majority. In our continuing battles over freedom of religion and expression, arms bearing, privacy, states' rights, and popular sovereignty, Amar concludes, we must hearken to both the Founding Fathers who created the Bill and their sons and daughters who reconstructed it. Amar's landmark work invites citizens to a deeper understanding of their Bill of Rights and will set the basic terms of debate about it for modern lawyers, jurists, and historians for years to come.
Book Synopsis Constitutional Morality and the Rise of Quasi-Law by : Bruce P. Frohnen
Download or read book Constitutional Morality and the Rise of Quasi-Law written by Bruce P. Frohnen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are ruled by an unwritten constitution consisting of executive orders, signing statements, and other quasi-laws designed to reform society, Bruce Frohnen and George Carey argue. Consequently, the Constitution no longer means what it says to the people it is supposed to govern and the government no longer acts according to the rule of law.
Book Synopsis Beyond Confederation by : Richard Beeman
Download or read book Beyond Confederation written by Richard Beeman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Confederation scrutinizes the ideological background of the U.S. Constitution, the rigors of its writing and ratification, and the problems it both faced and provoked immediately after ratification. The essays in this collection question much of the heritage of eighteenth-century constitutional thought and suggest that many of the commonly debated issues have led us away from the truly germane questions. The authors challenge many of the traditional generalizations and the terms and scope of that debate as well. The contributors raise fresh questions about the Constitution as it enters its third century. What happened in Philadelphia in 1787, and what happened in the state ratifying conventions? Why did the states--barely--ratify the Constitution? What were Americans of the 1789s attempting to achieve? The exploratory conclusions point strongly to an alternative constitutional tradition, some of it unwritten, much of it rooted in state constitutional law; a tradition that not only has redefined the nature and role of the Constitution but also has placed limitations on its efficacy throughout American history. The authors are Lance Banning, Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, Richard D. Brown, Richard E. Ellis, Paul Finkelman, Stanley N. Katz, Ralph Lerner, Drew R. McCoy, John M. Murrin, Jack N. Rakove, Janet A. Riesman, and Gordon S. Wood.
Book Synopsis Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy by : Brian Christopher Jones
Download or read book Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy written by Brian Christopher Jones and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy investigates the increasingly important subject of constitutional idolatry and its effects on democracy. Focussed around whether the UK should draft a single written constitution, it suggests that constitutions have been drastically and persistently over-sold throughout the years, and that their wider importance and effects are not nearly as significant as constitutional advocates maintain. Chapters analyse whether written constitutions can educate the citizenry, invigorate voter turnout, or deliver ‘We the People’ sovereignty.
Book Synopsis Amending America's Unwritten Constitution by : Richard Albert
Download or read book Amending America's Unwritten Constitution written by Richard Albert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is well known that the US Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times since its creation in 1787, but that number does not reflect the true extent of constitutional change in America. Although the Constitution is globally recognized as a written text, it consists also of unwritten rules and principles that are just as important, such as precedents, customs, traditions, norms, presuppositions, and more. These, too, have been amended, but how does that process work? In this book, leading scholars of law, history, philosophy, and political science consider the many theoretical, conceptual, and practical dimensions of what it means to amend America's 'unwritten Constitution': how to change the rules, who may legitimately do it, why leaders may find it politically expedient to enact written instead of unwritten amendments, and whether anything is lost by changing the constitution without a codified constitutional amendment.
