Over the last forty years modern constitutional scholarship has concentrated on an analysis of rights, while principles of constitutional law concerning the structure of government have been largely downplayed. The irony of this interpretive emphasis is that the body of the Constitution contains relatively little dealing directly with rights. Rather, it is primarily a blueprint for the establishment of a complex form of federal-democratic structure. This work emphasizes the central role served by the structural portions of the Constitution. Redish argues that these structural values were designed to provide the framework in which our rights-based system may flourish, and that judicial abandonment of these structural values threatens the very foundations of American political theory.
This needed resource, written specifically for students and general readers, provides accessible discussions of 74 landmark Supreme Court cases that will help students understand the cases and their importance in American history. Cases selected for this work are those in which the Supreme Court's decisions have had a profound impact on society and the future and a meaning that transcends the impact on the immediate parties. In his own words, Donald Lively, Dean of Florida Coastal School of Law, discusses the facts, background, and significance of each landmark case so that students will be able to easily understand it. Each case features a fact box for quick reference succinctly identifying the issue, year of decision, outcome, vote, and author of the opinion. The narrative discussion of each case puts it in historical perspective, examines the background and constitutional issue involved, the case itself, why it is a landmark case, and its significance and impact. A short bibliography directs readers to a,more in-depth discussion of the case and issue.
This book considers the threarts to free speech and online commerce posed by international goverment attempting to impose such territorial statutes and standards within cyberspace.
Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence--vividly captured on television--that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.