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Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that the earth belongs to the living. His letter to James Madison is often quoted for the proposition that we should not be bound to the 'dead hand of the past', suggesting that the Constitution should instead be interpreted as a living, breathing document. Less well-known is Madison's response, in which he said the improvements made by the dead - including the US Constitution - form a debt against the living, who benefit from them. In this illuminating book, Ilan Wurman introduces Madison's concept of originalism to a new generation and shows how it has shaped the US Supreme Court in ways that are expected to continue following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the theory's leading proponents. It should be read by anyone seeking a better understanding of originalism and its ongoing influence on the constitutional jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.

Constitutional law --- Originalism

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When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written-the one that had established a federal government manned by the people's own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens' inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people's representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan &quote;experts,&quote; an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson's dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR's batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers' vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court-the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language-he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas's biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America's future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.

African American judges --- Constitutional law --- Afro-American judges --- Judges, African American --- Negro judges --- Judges --- Thomas, Clarence, --- United States. --- Supreme Court (U.S.) --- Chief Justice of the United States --- Supreme Court of the United States --- 美國. --- Officials and employees --- Originalism.

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H. Jefferson Powell offers a powerful new approach to one of the central issues in American constitutional thinking today: the problem of constitutional law's historicity, or the many ways in which constitutional arguments and outcomes are shaped both by historical circumstances and by the political goals and commitments of various actors, including judges. The presence of such influences is often considered highly problematic: if constitutional law is political and historical through and through, then what differentiates it from politics per se, and what gives it integrity and coherence? Powell argues that constitutional theory has as its (sometimes hidden) agenda the ambition of showing how constitutional law can escape from history and politics, while much constitutional history seeks to identify an historically true meaning of the constitutional text that, once uncovered, can serve as a corrective to subsequent deviations from that truth. Combining history and theory, Powell analyzes a series of constitutional controversies from 1790 to 1944 to demonstrate that constitutional law from its very beginning has involved politically charged and ideologically divisive arguments. Nowhere in our past can one find the golden age of apolitical constitutional thinking that a great deal of contemporary scholarship seeks or presupposes. Viewed over time, American constitutional law is a history of political dispute couched in constitutional terms. Powell then takes his conclusions one step further, claiming that it is precisely this historical tradition of argument that has given American constitutional law a remarkable coherence and integrity over time. No matter what the particular political disputes of the day might be, constitutional argument has provided a shared language through which our political community has been able to fight out its battles without ultimately fracturing. A Community Built on Words will be must reading for any student of constitutional history, theory, or law.

Constitutional law --- Constitutional history --- United States --- Politics and government. --- Government --- History, Political --- constitution, law, historicity, living document, originalism, judges, supreme court, history, theory, foreign affairs power, jefferson, national bank, interpretation, sovereignty, judiciary, kamper v hawkins, sedition act, marshall, paterson, religion, slavery, politics, nonfiction, brandeis, holmes, railroad, clay may, citizenship, supremacy, mann, dissent, madison, veto, separation of powers, legislation, hudgins wright, turpin locket.

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We often hear-with particular frequency during recent Supreme Court nomination hearings-that justices should not create constitutional rights, but should instead enforce the rights that the Constitution enshrines. In Regulatory Rights, Larry Yackle sets out to convince readers that such arguments fundamentally misconceive both the work that justices do and the character of the American Constitution in whose name they do it. It matters who sits on the Supreme Court, he argues, precisely because justices do create individual constitutional rights. Traversing a wide range of Supreme Court decisions that established crucial precedents about racial discrimination, the death penalty, and sexual freedom, Yackle contends that the rights we enjoy are neither more nor less than what the justices choose to make of them. Regulatory Rights is a bracing read that will be heatedly debated by all those interested in constitutional law and the judiciary.

Constitutional law --- Police power --- Civil rights --- United States. --- Supreme Court (U.S.) --- Chief Justice of the United States --- Supreme Court of the United States --- 美國. --- United States --- Interpretation and construction --- United States. Supreme Court --- activist, activism, supreme court, courtroom, judge, law, legal, litigation, constitution, constitutional, public, academic, scholarly, research, school, classroom, higher ed, college, university, textbook, professor, nomination, nominee, hearings, justice, united states, usa, america, american, federal, originalism, formalism, equality, purpose.

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The United States Supreme Court closed the courthouse door to federal litigation to narrow educational funding and opportunity gaps in schools when it ruled in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez in 1973 that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to education. Rodriguez pushed reformers back to the state courts where they have had some success in securing reforms to school funding systems through education and equal protection clauses in state constitutions, but far less success in changing the basic structure of school funding in ways that would ensure access to equitable and adequate funding for schools. Given the limitations of state school funding litigation, education reformers continue to seek new avenues to remedy inequitable disparities in educational opportunity and achievement, including recently returning to federal court. 0This book is the first comprehensive examination of three issues regarding a federal right to education: why federal intervention is needed to close educational opportunity and achievement gaps; the constitutional and statutory legal avenues that could be employed to guarantee a federal right to education; and, the scope of what a federal right to education should guarantee. 'A Federal Right to Education' provides a timely and thoughtful analysis of how the United States could fulfill its unmet promise to provide equal educational opportunity and the American Dream to every child, regardless of race, class, language proficiency, or neighborhood.

Right to education --- Educational equalization --- Law and legislation --- Right to learn --- Civil rights --- Education, Compulsory --- Education and state --- Educational law and legislation --- American dream. --- Constitution. --- Education Amendment. --- Latinas. --- Latinos. --- Spending Clause. --- Supreme Court. --- achievement gap. --- achievement gaps. --- adequacy litigation. --- adequate education. --- at-risk students. --- civic participation. --- constitutional amendment. --- constitutional interpretation. --- criminal justice. --- education federalism. --- education inadequacies. --- education inequality. --- educational opportunity gaps. --- educational opportunity. --- equal access to an excellent education. --- equal citizenship. --- equal education. --- equal educational opportunity. --- equal liberty. --- equal opportunity. --- equal protection. --- evidence-based reforms. --- excellent and equitable educational opportunity. --- federal education legislation. --- federal government. --- federal right to education. --- federal role in education. --- fiscal capacity. --- high-quality education. --- just society. --- libertystate constitutional rights. --- opportunity gap. --- opportunity gaps. --- opportunity to compete. --- originalism. --- political will. --- privileges and immunities. --- right to education. --- segregation. --- sovereignty. --- state constitutions. --- state courts. --- state education chiefs. --- state fiscal equity litigation. --- state legislatures. --- state school finance litigation. --- substantive due process.