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In 1938, Howard Jay Graham, a deaf law librarian, successfully argued that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment--ratified after the American Civil War to establish equal protection under the law for all American citizens regardless of race--were motivated by abolitionist fervor, debunking the notion of a corporate conspiracy at the heart of the amendment's wording. For over half a century, the amendment had been used to endow corporations with rights as individuals and thus protect them from state legislation. By 1968, when Everyman's Constitution was first published, the Fourteenth Amendment had become a tool for the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to apply to all American citizens. The essays in this reprinted edition are still relevant as the nation continues to interpret our framing legislation in light of the concerns of today and to balance citizens' rights against those of corporations. Howard Jay Graham was a law librarian brought in by the NAACP's legal team to write a brief on the Fourteenth Amendment for the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Though the Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of the NAACP based on the sociological rather than historical evidence it provided, Graham's work, published in various law journals over several decades, contributed greatly to the ongoing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The principle of equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed in the Constitution does not distinguish between individuals according to their capacities or merits. It is written into these documents to ensure that each and every person enjoys equal respect and equal rights. Judith Baer maintains, however, that in fact American judicial decisions have consistently denied individuals the form of equality to which they are legally entitled—that the courts have interpreted constitutional guarantees of equal protection in ways that undermine the original intent of Congress. In Equality under the Constitution, Baer examines the background, scope, and purpose of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment and the history of its interpretation by the courts. She traces the development of the idea of equality, drawing on the Bill of Rights, Congressional records, the Civil War amendments, and other sections of the Constitution. Baer discusses many of the significant equal-protection cases decided by the Supreme Court from the time of the amendment’s ratification, including decisions on reverse discrimination, age discrimination, the rights of the disabled, and gay rights. She concludes with a theory of equality more faithful to the history, language, and spirit of the Constitution.
The corporation has become the core institution of the modern world. Designed to seek profit and power, it has pursued both with endless tenacity, steadily bending the framework of law and even challenging the sovereign status of the state. Where did the corporation come from? How did it get so much power? What is its ultimate trajectory? In "Gangs of America", Ted Nace traces the rise of corporate power through a series of fascinating stories, each organized around a different facet of the central question: "How did corporations get more rights than people?" The result is an illuminating account of the people and events that have shaped this puzzling, endlessly evolving entity. -- From publisher's description.
John Bingham was the architect of the rebirth of the United States following the Civil War. A leading antislavery lawyer and congressman from Ohio, Bingham wrote the most important part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees fundamental rights and equality to all Americans. He was also at the center of two of the greatest trials in history, giving the closing argument in the military prosecution of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. And more than any other man, Bingham played the key role in shaping the Union’s policy towards the occupied ex-Confederate States, with consequences that still haunt our politics. American Founding Son provides the most complete portrait yet of this remarkable statesman. Drawing on his personal letters and speeches, the book traces Bingham’s life from his humble roots in Pennsylvania through his career as a leader of the Republican Party. Gerard N. Magliocca argues that Bingham and his congressional colleagues transformed the Constitution that the Founding Fathers created, and did so with the same ingenuity that their forbears used to create a more perfect union in the 1780s. In this book, Magliocca restores Bingham to his rightful place as one of our great leaders. Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He is the author of three books on constitutional law, and his work on Andrew Jackson was the subject of an hour-long program on C-Span’s Book TV.
This study uses basic economic analysis as a technique to comment critically on the original meaning and the interpretation of those clauses of the Constitution that have particular bearing on the economy. Many new conclusions are markedly different from those of the Supreme Court and earlier commentators. Conant's view is that the commerce clause and the equal protection clause, if they had been construed consistently with their comprehensive original meanings, would have given much greater federal protection against state laws that impaire free markets. Economic policy for the nation was vested in Congress. To the extent that special interests could buy congressional favor for their anticompetitive activities, free markets were impaired within constraints as interpreted by the court. These decisions have been criticized for their failure to incorporate the antimonopoly tradition in the Ninth Amendment and their failure to recognize equal protection of laws incorporated into the Fifth Amendment. Conant holds that statutory controls of the economy are justifiable in economic theory if they are designed to remedy market failures and thereby increase efficiency. If statutes are passed to interfere with markets and create market inefficiencies for the benefit of special interest groups, they should be condemned under the standards of normative microeconomics. There are four main classes of market failure: monopoly, externalities, public goods, and informational asymmetry. This masterful analysis examines all four reasons for market failure in depth. Litigation costs are analogous to transaction costs. If legal principles and rules are clearly and precisely defined by the Supreme Court when they are first appealed, litigation and its costs should be minimized. Conant claims that if legal principles or rules are uncertain because they lack definable standards, the number of legal actions filed and litigation costs will be much greater. This promotes additional litigation challenging the many statutes enacted to remedy asserted market failures in an expanding industrial economy. This work brilliantly addresses the danger to the economy in court rulings seeking to legislate standards of reasonableness.
Human Nature in Politics brings the competences and perspectives of law, philosophy and political science to bear on an imporant subject seldom treated at book length. The subject of human nature in politics is as old as systematic thought about politics. Out of favor for a period in modern times, it is now once more the subject of attention by political theorists who often borrow heavily from the disciplines of biology and psychology. The plurality of their approaches and insights is reflecteed in Part I of the book: Perspectives on Human Nature. Although appeals to human nature have historically been made by both radicals and conservatives, it is the latter who have more typically sought support from this source. However, modern radicals are beginning to re-explore the subject, as is evidenced in the second section on "Human Nature and Radical Political Thought." In the concluding section of the book, four authors analyze the question of "Rationality and Human Nature" and, with a broader interpretation of rationality, find bases in human nature for some confidence that politics need not be an irrational enterprise. The bibliography at the end of the volume is of particular value for all students of political theory. Thirteen outstanding authors contribute to this volume, which must be of interest to legal philosophers and students of jurisprudence in all English-speaking countries.
Race, as this book demonstrates, has been a factor in the Constitution's framing, ratification, and development. Examined specifically and in detail are: * the accommodation of slavery to create a viable republic; * the Union's experience with and eventual undoing by slavery; * reconstruction of the nation pursuant to seminal principles of racial equality; * persisting efforts to limit or defeat constitutional provisions for equality and opportunity; * the desegregation mandate and its devolution; and * modern problems in accounting for a legacy of racial discrimination and disadvantage. The Constitution is the overarching statement of popular will and consent and thus an especially apt prism through which to discern racial truths and the context and values that influence them. Constitutional law affords a particularly useful departure point for acquiring perspective upon moral reality and legal possibility. This book is rich in its analysis of the Supreme Court's response to society's ambiguities, concerns, and conscience in the matters of race. In examining problems and issues which historically have engendered dispute and division, it suggests a potentially consensual basis of ascertaining the Constitution's still unfinished business. The nation's enduring ambivalence and the price it pays in less than consistent constitutional interpretations on racial questions is both enlightening and disturbing. The questions, of course, are at the heart of a democracy and involve personhood, citizenship, liberty, and equality. The Constitution and Race will be valuable to political scientists, historians, sociologists, lawyers, and students.
At stage center of the American drama, maintains David A. J. Richards, is the attempt to understand the implications of the Reconstruction Amendments--Amendments Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen to the United States Constitution. Richards evaluates previous efforts to interpret the amendments and then proposes his own view: together the amendments embodied a self-conscious rebirth of America's revolutionary, rights-based constitutionalism. Building on an approach to constitutional law developed in his Toleration and the Constitution and Foundations of American Constitutionalism, Richards links history, law, and political theory. In Conscience and the Constitution, this method leads from an analysis of the Reconstruction Amendments to a broad discussion of the American constitutional system as a whole. Richards's interpretation focuses on the abolitionists and their radical commitment to the "dissenting conscience." In his view, the Reconstruction Amendments expressed not only the constitutional arguments of a particular historical period but also a general political theory developed by the abolitionists, who restructured the American political community in terms of respect for universal human rights. He argues further that the amendments make a claim on our generation to keep faith with the vision of the "founders of 1865." In specific terms he points out what such allegiance would mean in the context of present-day constitutional issues. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The role of the Constitution in American political history is contentious not simply because of battles over meaning. Equally important is precisely who participated in contests over meaning. Was it simply judges, or did legislatures have a strong say? And what about the public's role in effecting constitutional change? In The Civic Constitution, Elizabeth Beaumont focuses on the last category, and traces the efforts of citizens to reinvent constitutional democracy during four crucial eras: the revolutionaries of the 1770s and 1780s; the civic founders of state republics and the national Constitution in the early national period; abolitionists during the antebellum and Civil War eras; and, finally, suffragists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout, she argues that these groups should be recognized as founders and co-founders of the U.S. Constitution. Though often slighted in modern constitutional debates, these women and men developed distinctive constitutional creeds and practices, challenged existing laws and social norms, expanded the boundaries of citizenship, and sought to translate promises of liberty, equality, and justice into more robust and concrete forms. Their civic ideals and struggles not only shaped the text, design, and public meaning of the U.S. Constitution, but reconstructed its membership and transformed the fundamental commitments of the American political community. An innovative expansion on the concept of popular constitutionalism, The Civic Constitution is a vital contribution to the growing body of literature on how ordinary people have shaped the parameters of America's fundamental laws.