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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841—1935) is generally considered one of the two greatest justices of the United States Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall being the other. In more than 2000 opinions, he delineated an impressive legal philosophy that profoundly influenced American jurisprudence, particularly in the area of civil liberties and judicial restraint. At the same time, his abilities as a prose stylist earned him a position among the...
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The third book in the &LAW series addresses the perpetual issue of state sovereignty in the federal union-states' rights. From the 1770's, through the Confederate states' secession, and continuing until now, a central issue of governance is state power to object to, cancel, or be immune from federal law. The issue is fervently debated in the political arena by Tea Party efforts to limit federal intervention in education and health care; and the nullification...
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Based on 20 years of research, including an examination of the papers of eight of the nine Justices who voted in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, Abuse of Discretion is a critical review of the behind-the-scenes deliberations that went into the Supreme Court's abortion decisions and how the mistakes made by the Justices in 1971-1973 have led to the turmoil we see today in legislation, politics, and public health. The first half of the book looks at...
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Justin Crowe is assistant professor of political science at Williams College.
How did the federal judiciary transcend early limitations to become a powerful institution of American governance? How did the Supreme Court move from political irrelevance to political centrality? Building the Judiciary uncovers the causes and consequences of judicial institution-building in the United States from the commencement of the new government in 1789 through...
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More than any other people on earth, Americans are free to say and write what they think. The media can air the secrets of the White House, the boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. The reason for this extraordinary freedom is not a superior culture of tolerance, but just fourteen words in our most fundamental legal document: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution. In Lewis's telling,...
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Recounting controversial First Amendment cases from the Red Scare era to Citizens United, William Bennett Turner-a Berkeley law professor who has argued three cases before the Supreme Court-shows how we've arrived at our contemporary understanding of free speech. His strange cast of heroes and villains, some drawn from cases he has litigated, includes Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Ku Klux Klansmen, the world's leading pornographer, prison wardens,...
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The death of Georgia governor-elect Eugene Talmadge in late 1946 launched a constitutional crisis that ranks as one of the most unusual political events in U.S. history: the state had three active governors at once, each claiming that he was the true elected official.
This is the first full-length examination of that episode, which wasn't just a crazy quirk of Georgia politics (though it was that) but the decisive battle in a struggle between the...
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In the mid-seventeenth century, judges in the short-lived New Haven Colony presided over a remarkable series of trials ranging from murder and bestiality, to drunken sailors, frisky couples, faulty shoes, and shipwrecks. The cases were reported in an unusually vivid manner, allowing readers to witness the twists and turns of fortune as the participants battled with life and liberty at stake.
When the records were eventually published in the 1850s,...
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"Timothy Sandefur's insightful new book provides a dramatic new challenge to the status quo of constitutional law and argues a vital truth: our Constitution was written not to empower democracy, but to secure liberty. Yet the overemphasis on democracy by today's legal community-rather than the primacy of liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence-has helped expand the scope of government power at the expense of individual rights. Now,...
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