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In this authoritative reckoning with the eighteen-year record of the Rehnquist Court, Georgetown law professor Mark Tushnet reveals how the decisions of nine deeply divided justices have left the future of the Court; and the nation; hanging in the balance. Many have assumed that the chasm on the Court has been between its liberals and its conservatives. In reality, the division was between those in tune with the modern post-Reagan Republican Party and those who, though considered to be in the Court's center, represent an older Republican tradition. As a result, the Court has modestly promoted the agenda of today's economic conservatives, but has regularly defeated the agenda of social issues conservatives; while paving the way for more radically conservative path in the future.
The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution at a level sufficiently general to guide lawmaking while avoiding great detail. This four-page document has guided the United States of America for more than two centuries. The Supreme Court has parsed the document into clauses, which plaintiffs and defendants invoke in cases or controversies before the Court. Some, like the Interstate Commerce Clause, are central to the survival of a government of multiple sovereignties. The practice of observing case precedents allows orderly development of the law and consistent direction to the lower courts. The Court itself claimed the final power of judicial review, despite efforts to the contrary by the executive and legislative branches of the national government and the state supreme courts. The Court then limited its own awesome power through a series of self-imposed rules of justiciability. These rules set the conditions under which the Court may exercise the extraordinary final power of judicial review. Some of these self-imposed limits are prudential, some logical, and some inviting periodic revision. This book examines the detailed unfolding of several Constitutional clauses and the rules of justiciability. For each clause and each rule of justiciability, the book begins with the brilliant foundations laid by Chief Justice John Marshall, then to the anti-Federalist era, the Civil War, the dominance of laissez faire and social Darwinism, the Great Depression redirection, the civil rights era, and finally the often-hapless efforts of Chief Justice Rehnquist.
Thoughtful, wide-ranging, and intelligently written, this volume is an insightful look at the Rehnquist Court and its impact on law and American life.
Follows Rehnquist's career as a young lawyer in Arizona through his journey to Washington though the Warren and Burger courts to his twenty-year tenure as a Supreme Court Chief Justice who favored government power over individual rights.
We see these two men serving together for two momentous decades, the leaders of the Court's liberal and conservative factions. We come to know them, their characters, their personalities, their beliefs.
A leading legal scholar explores how the constitutional right to seek justice has been restricted by the Supreme Court The Supreme Court s decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court s record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens constitutional rights. The Court has restricted who has standing to sue, expanded the immunity of governments and government workers, limited the kinds of cases the federal courts can hear, and restricted the right of habeas corpus. Closing the Courthouse Door, by the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, is the first book to show the effect of these decisions: taken together, they add up to a growing limitation on citizens ability to defend their rights under the Constitution. Using many stories of people whose rights have been trampled yet who had no legal recourse, Chemerinsky argues that enforcing the Constitution should be the federal courts primary purpose, and they should not be barred from considering any constitutional question.
In this groundbreaking analysis of Supreme Court decision-making, Andrew Coan explains how judicial caseload shapes the course of American constitutional law and the role of the Court in American society. Compared with the vast machinery surrounding Congress and the president, the Supreme Court is a tiny institution that can resolve only a small fraction of the constitutional issues that arise in any given year. Rationing the Constitution shows that this simple yet frequently ignored fact is essential to understanding how the Supreme Court makes constitutional law. Due to the structural organization of the judiciary and certain widely shared professional norms, the capacity of the Supreme Court to review lower-court decisions is severely limited. From this fact, Andrew Coan develops a novel and arresting theory of Supreme Court decision-making. In deciding cases, the Court must not invite more litigation than it can handle. On many of the most important constitutional questions—touching on federalism, the separation of powers, and individual rights—this constraint creates a strong pressure to adopt hard-edged categorical rules, or defer to the political process, or both. The implications for U.S. constitutional law are profound. Lawyers, academics, and social activists pursuing social reform through the courts must consider whether their goals can be accomplished within the constraints of judicial capacity. Often the answer will be no. The limits of judicial capacity also substantially constrain the Court’s much touted—and frequently lamented—power to overrule democratic majorities. As Rationing the Constitution demonstrates, the Supreme Court is David, not Goliath.
William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, provides an insightful and fascinating account of the history of civil liberties during wartime and illuminates the cases where presidents have suspended the law in the name of national security. "A highly original account of the proper role of the Supreme Court, a role that makes most sense in times of war, but that has its attractions whenever the Court is embroiled in great social controversies." --The New Republic Abraham Lincoln, champion of freedom and the rights of man, suspended the writ of habeas corpus early in the Civil War--later in the war he also imposed limits upon freedom of speech and the press and demanded that political criminals be tried in military courts. During World War II, the government forced 100,000 U.S. residents of Japanese descent, including many citizens, into detainment camps. Through these and other incidents Chief Justice Rehnquist brilliantly probes the issues at stake in the balance between the national interest and personal freedoms. With All the Laws but One he significantly enlarges our understanding of how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution during past periods of national crisis--and draws guidelines for how it should do so in the future.
"The institution of citizenship has undergone significant change in the last two decades. Since the 1990s, dozens of countries have changed their laws to permit dual citizenship, moving away from the previous model that demanded exclusive allegiance. As a consequence, tens of millions of people around the world now hold citizenship in two (and sometimes three or four) countries. These changes have inevitably had an affect on the lived experience and personal meaning of citizenship, but the existing literature on dual citizenship has mostly focused on immigrants in Western Europe and North America and has inquired about identity and sentimental aspects of citizenship. Yossi Harpaz looks beyond the West in this book, arguing that the rise of dual citizenship has created new opportunities for non-Western elites to convert local advantages into a global resource. Millions draw on ancestral or ethnic ties to Western/EU countries or create such ties strategically in order to obtain a second nationality that will provide them with additional opportunities, an insurance policy, a high-prestige passport and even social status. He draws on qualitative and quantitative material from three cases that represent three pathways to compensatory citizenship: Hungarian-speaking Serbians who draw on their ethnicity to acquire a second citizenship from Hungary; upper-class Mexicans who engage in "birth tourism" in order to secure American citizenship for their children; and Israelis who reacquire the citizenship of European countries from which their parents and grandparents had immigrated half a century earlier"--