Book Description
Parliamentary and presidential government, exemplified by the United Kingdom and most continental European countries on the one hand and the United States and Latin America on the other, are the two principal forms of democracy in the modern world. Their respective advantages and disadvantages have long been debated, at first mainly by British and American political observers, but with increasing frequency in other parts of the world too, especially in Latin America and Asia. The recent world-wide wave of democratization has intensified both the debate and its significance. This volume brings together the most important statements on the subject, by advocates and analysts from Montesquieu and Madison to Lipset and Linz. It also treats the merits of less frequently used democratic types, such as French-style semi-presidentialism, that may be regarded as intermediate forms between parliamentarism and presidentialism.
Book Description
Our Constitution speaks in general terms of "liberty" and "property," of the "privileges and immunities" of citizens, and of the "equal protection of the laws"--open-ended phrases that seem to invite readers to reflect in them their own visions and agendas. Yet, recognizing that the Constitution cannot be merely what its interpreters wish it to be, this volume's authors draw on literary and mathematical analogies to explore how the fundamental charter of American government should be construed today.
Customer Reviews:
Historically inacurate.......2001-09-06
As was suggested in the previous reviews reading this to find a cogent methodology for Constitutional exegesis is futile, and it was with that expectation I bought the book, relying on the reputation of it's authors.
Several premises are disturbing, for they point out a lack of Historical background of our founding. It suggests there are significant anomalies, for example if the Constitution gives the States a right to republican government and does not define republican government then a pliant construction and application of the text is suggested, this kind of logic is furthered in describing the general terms of the preamble as granting a broad license for inerpretation. The number of explanations offered by Madison on the subject of republican form of gvernment alone is sufficient to dispell the former, and with regard to the latter the topic was first adressed by Brutus, an Antifederlaist, and well responded to in Federalist Essay 41. As the Federalist Essays were a response to fears and criticisms of the then proposed Constitution, the ratification debates as well as the Federalist Essays does grant a significant view as to the consent of the governed 'On Reading the Constitution' seems to deny existed, or may presently exist.
The authors proceed to draw from confusions in the 'conservative' camp regarding constitutional specificity to further their point, quoting Rhenquist from a Texas Law Review article 1976, 'The framers of the Constitution wisely spoke in general language and left to succeeding generations the task of applying that language to the increasingly changing environment..' Alas poor Madison's efforts in describing the exertions of perspicuity found in federalist 37, having missed the attention of liberals as well as conservatives, has opened the door to a pliant construction of the Constitution. We were also cautioned by Madison to be wary of the changes of the meaning of words over time, Adams once described a church service as 'awful' he meant full of awe, this example is not solitary, and it's impact has not been fully examined.
I hold no doubt both Michael Dorf, and Laurence Tribe are concerned and virtuous citizens, as well as skilled and erudite practioners of Law, yet the book allows little insight into Constitutional Exegesis. Lincoln warned at Cooper Union to never supplant the logic of the fathers when we realize they understood the question better than we, it is time we examine what they knew, instead of focusing on the confusion that might exist.
Doesn't offer much original insight.......2001-03-17
If you find youself reading this or any other work by Laurence Tribe, it is pretty safe to assume that you also find youself somewhere on the left of the political spectrum. I can only imagine that you would come to this book looking for a coherent theory on how to read and interpret that sometimes vague and confusing document upon which our country was founded. Unfortunately, you will not find much original insight in this book, though if you are merely looking for an argument with which to attack so-called "strict constructionism," this will serve that purpose quite well.
It seemed to me that this book did little more than offer up a series of comparisons between law and the Constitution and other disciplines like literature and mathematics. While that may serve a useful purpose, it is of little value for those attempting to find a workable liberal theory through which to interpret the Constitution. And repeatedly throughout this book Tribe and Dorf explicity state that they do not have such a theory, or at least refuse to claim that their ideas are in any way paramount or final.
Nonetheless, it does offer up seveal solid critiques of conservative interpretations of the Constitution which might come in handy, or at least serve as a starting point for further investigation. I would also recommed that one read Antonin Scalia's "A Matter of Interpretation," which contains a rebuttal by Laurence Tribe similar to the arguments found here, but also has a very solidly philosophical criticism of Scalia's "textualist" theory by Ronald Dworkin.
Finally, and this has little to do with this book and more to do with jwhoeme's review below - jwhoeme seems to think that Tribe's chapter or arguments on how NOT to read the Constitution somehow presuppose that he knows how to read it, and I feel that that is a rather poor assumption on the part of jwhoeme. Just because one says they know how NOT to do something doesn't me they know how to do it. I know that bashing someone in the head with a rock is not how one performs brain surgery, but that doesn't mean I have any idea how to do it properly.
Thought Provoking Read.......1999-06-23
Dr. Tribe of Harvard Law makes many interesting points in his book concerning the methods and approach one ought to take while reading or interpreting the Constitution. I would suggest this book to people that have read the Constitution not once but many times and who are looking to further their understanding. On the contrary you should not purchase this book looking for a formula to understand the Constitution! Rather this book promotes one's thoughts and helps the reader develop an approach in which they ought and ought not read the Constitution. Interestingly enough, for Tribe to claim that he knows the manner in which we ought not read the Constitution presupposes that he knows how we ought to. This then contradicts his final chapters when he claims that there is no correct approach to the Constitution and that any one person's interpretation is no more right nor wrong than the next reader's.
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Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)
Kelly Lynch Reames
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 1403972389
Release Date: 2007-01-09 |
Book Description
Much feminist writing of recent decades has addressed the difficulties of relating across racial differences. In Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison, Kelly Reames looks to novels and autobiographies to discover how contemporary writers have imagined possibilities for relationships between African American and white women that overcome the stereotypical patterns of racism.
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Freedom's Law is Dworkin's impassioned defense of free speech and conscience. The thread that ties these essays together is his criticism of strict historical interpretation of the Constitution, which holds that our modern-day understanding must be strictly limited to the concerns of the Constitution's framers, rather than the underlying principles embodied within. Divided into three parts, the book examines the soundness of Roe v. Wade, defends a broad reading of the First Amendment and attacks the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
Book Description
Ronald Dworkin argues that Americans have been systematically misled about what their Constitution is, and how judges decide what it means. The Constitution, he observes, grants individual rights in extremely abstract terms. The First Amendment prohibits the passing of laws that "abridge the freedom of speech"; the Fifth Amendment insists on "due process of law"; and the Fourteenth Amendment demands "equal protection of the laws" for all persons. What does that abstract language mean when it is applied to the political controversies that divide Americans--about affirmative action and racial justice, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, censorship, pornography, and homosexuality, for example? Judges, and ultimately the justices of the Supreme Court, must decide for everyone, and that gives them great power. How should they decide?
Dworkin defends a particular answer to that question, which he calls the moral reading of the Constitution. He argues that the Bill of Rights must be understood as setting out general moral principles about liberty and equality and dignity, and that private citizens, lawyers, and finally judges must interpret and apply those general principles by posing and trying to answer more concrete moral questions. Is freedom to choose abortion really a basic moral right and would curtailing that right be a deep injustice, for example? Why? In the detailed discussions of individual constitutional issues that form the bulk of the book, Dworkin shows that our judges do decide hard constitutional cases by posing and answering such concrete moral questions. Indeed he shows that that is the only way they can decide those cases.
But most judges--and most politicians and most law professors--pretend otherwise. They say that judges must never treat constitutional issues as moral issues because that would be undemocratic--it would mean that judges were substituting their own moral convictions for those of Congressmen and state legislators who had been elected by the people. So they insist that judges can, and should, decide in some more mechanical way which involves no fresh moral judgment on their part.
The result, Dworkin shows, has been great constitutional confusion. Is the premise at the core of this confusion really sound? Is the moral reading--the only reading of the American Constitution that makes sense--really undemocratic? In spirited and illuminating discussions both of the great constitutional cases of recent years, and of general constitutional principles, Dworkin argues, to the contrary, that the distinctly American version of government under principle, based on the moral reading of the Constitution, is in fact the best account of what democracy really is.
Customer Reviews:
Why the Supreme Court is Wrong.......2003-05-03
One of the country's leading legal philosophers collects a series of essays (most originally appearing in the New York Review of Books) which examine the ... basis for the United States Constitution, and attack the "original intent" interpretation, most famously spouted by Bork.
The book's strength is Dworkin's accessible writing style (which may stem from the popular press origins of most of these essays) and his tight analysis of several cutting edge issues--abortion, affirmative action, free speech, as well as some historically important battles--the Bork and Thomas nominations.
His bottom line is (although he does not say this explicitly) that the recent Supreme Court, abbeted by a series of Republican presidents, has begun a revolution in legal thinking which rejects the 200 year old liberal tradition of judicial interpretation, and in the process has substituted results based, conservative politics for any semblance of judicial reasoning.
The weakness of the book is that many examples and arguments are repeated between essays, covering the same ground in virtually the same words from different times.
A much easier read than "Taking Rights Seriously", although the latter clearly is a more complete exposition of Dworkin's philosophy.
For a counter argument, see any of Judge Posner's recent work, which explicitly takes on Dworkin's philosophy.
A Legal Classic.......2002-03-05
Ronald Dworkin is perhaps today's Bentham. His views on Constitutional Interpretation in this book are so vividly written and lucidly explained. His views on Judicial Activism equating it with natural interpretation are worth considering if not fully acceptable.
Old Ideas for Re-Discussion.......1998-05-31
Since this book consists of occasional pieces collected under a common rubric, it's persuasive thrust will find its target in a readership that is already sympathetic to Dworkin's legal and political philosophy. The arguments are not finely made, as they are in, say, *Taking Rights Seriously*, or in *Life's Dominion*. Many of the illustrative parables he uses, he's used before. That being said, *Freedom's Law* is a good collection highlighting the contours of Dworkin's fundamental objections to legal positivism. I think it is possible to follow Dworkin's non-interpretivist method without arriving at the same(moral)conclusions. But if you aren't already familiar with Dworkin's intellectual base of operations, a better place to start would be *Taking Rights Seriously* (easy to find) or, even better, his early and very important essay, "Is Law a System of Rules?" reprinted in *The Philosophy of Law* ed. by Dworkin (harder to find). To his credit, in this latter collection, he gives ample space to views contrary to his own, such as Hart's positivism, and Finnis' moral arguments against abortion.
Customer Reviews:
How the Founders learned their politics.......2007-04-05
H. Trevor Colbourn writes that the college-educated colonists received a heavy dose of the Greek and Roman classics. This classical education would make it easy for them to assimilate into their own character the virtues embodied in Cato the Younger. Many of these men, such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, and others, would quote from the play in many of their writings and speeches. Colbourn asserts that in the years leading up to the American Revolution, and especially after the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, the play "Cato" served as the epitome of resistance to tyrannical British rule for many colonists.
It is indicative of the Age of Enlightenment, which educated leaders such as America's Founding Fathers, to select their models of heroic virtue from Greco-Roman history instead of from the Bible. Plays, such as Addison's "Cato" social and philosophical message was clear to any Enlightenment audience because it was Roman moral virtues and not Christian morality that Enlightenment audiences most embraced. Cato's self-reliance caused his actions; not his reliance on God. This notion of men acting outside the sphere of religious bonds was an important lesson that was certainly not lost on our Founders, especially since many of them were such devoted disciples to Enlightenment ideals. In fact, one could stipulate that "Cato" is part of a genre of plays that replaced the Christian morality plays that had been so popular for centuries in Europe.
The revolutionary generation immersed themselves in the classics, which enabled them to be on the look out for examples of distant tyrannical rule. The Founding Fathers believed that in order for a new nation to survive as a republic, they would need to remake men in the mold of Cato as portrayed in Addison's play, and as other heroic men found in "Plutarch's Lives." Cato was first and foremost a patriot. He would not have sullied himself by becoming embroiled in party politics. Thus, the Founders learned from his example and understood that they too had to be especially diligent in guarding against men forming political factions and the misuse of political power for their own self-interest. This is why Founders, such as Thomas Jefferson, placed such high hopes for raising a virtuous body of citizens through education, which became one of his motivating factors for founding the University of Virginia. Aside from Addison's flowery prose and powerful imagery on stage, "Cato's" most important and enduring role in the American colonies was its political message; fighting to the death, if necessary, for freedom from tyranny.
I read this book for a graduate Humanities class. Recommended for people interested in literature, history, philosophy, and the founding of America.
Ideas have consequences.......2006-01-17
Richard Weaver's famous book title has almost become a cliché these days, but if there's one book where the idea behind it truly applies, this one might be it. It may seem boringly circular to read a history book about the history books the founding generation read, but in fact this is an interesting and important work of intellectual history. It certainly repays reading for anyone interested in the ideas behind the American revolution.
Colburn presents a strong case that the leaders of the revolution (and the preceding generation) had a common frame of reference and a shared understanding of "the lessons of history." To that extent, it hardly matters that their common understanding of the Saxon roots of English liberty has been largely discredited by more recent scholarship, as the author explains in an appendix. *They* believed it was true, and the lessons they took from it shaped their ideas about law and philosophy, as well as history. Indeed, law, philosophy, and history were all very closely interwoven to members of that generation -- far more so than they are to modern minds. It is a rare politician today who has a deep acquaintance with history (apart from sketchy conclusions regarding "the lessons of Vietnam" or "the lessons of Munich," as Jeffery Record ruefully noted in "Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo" [Naval Institute Press, 2002]), and rarer still one who can tease out of history a coherent philosophy of man's relation to other men and to the State.
This book isn't for everyone. Because it's intellectual history, it can get kind of dry at times. And I found the scope of the book rather narrower than I was expecting -- exploring the "Saxon roots" idea takes up most of Colbourn's time, although he does a fine job showing how different interpreters employed that idea in different ways. But it deserves a place alongside books like Bailyn's "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" on the shelves of anyone seeking those ideas, the consequences of which were the War for Independence. This book was on my to-read list for a very long time, and I'm glad I finally made myself pick it up and read it. It confirmed my suspicion that it's one I should have read a long time ago.
Fascinating Study.......1999-09-10
This book is a pure jem. Colbourn presents an elegant treatment of the ideology of the Revolutionaries, with special emphasis on the role and use of history in their thought. Perhaps the most captivating pieces are those focusing specifically on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. In addition to this, he includes actual listings of books in Colonial stores and libraries. Above all, this is an invaluable study for anyone interested in this subject.
Great explanation of the paradigm during American Revolution.......1999-04-21
Great book to read in order to understand the thoughts and the fears of the revolutionaries both leading up to the actual revolution and the problems resulting from the new nation. It gives excellent insight into key thinkers and provides a good viewpoint to judge the legitamacy of the American complaints. If you love the thought processes of the intellectuals of the revolution you will enjoy this book.
Customer Reviews:
Intriguing religious commentary on America/Constitution.......2003-01-06
A must-read for all serious constitutional scholars, political science majors, American history buffs, religious scholars, and anyone generally interested in the genesis of America.
I found this book to be very enlightening and extremely useful in my personal studies of the Constitution. A delightful intellectual feast, it gives the reader a complete view of the sort of religious overtones the Founding Fathers assumed the American people would intrinsically understand, but which have been lost to many. For Latter-Day Saints (lds.org), it is a wonderful feast of knowledge, shedding light on many lesser-known facts about the American continent, the Constitution, and everything which is related to these two subjects.
This has moved to the top of my list of ideological books that have a foundation in religion. I highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in the Constitution and/or America.
The best thing about this book is that once you are finished reading it, you will feel as if an entire world of thought which was previously unknown to you has been exposed to the point that it cannot be hid from you any longer. It really has opened my eyes to truths which I had not supposed existed. It really broadens your perspective on the stated subjects.
All in all, highly recommended to anyone who bothered to click on the link to read this far.
Intriguing religious commentary on America/Constitution.......2003-01-06
A must-read for all serious constitutional scholars, political science majors, American history buffs, religious scholars, and anyone generally interested in the genesis of America.
I found this book to be very enlightening and extremely useful in my personal studies of the Constitution. A delightful intellectual feast, it gives the reader a complete view of the sort of religious overtones the Founding Fathers assumed the American people would intrinsically understand, but which have been lost to many. For Latter-Day Saints (lds.org), it is a wonderful feast of knowledge, shedding light on many lesser-known facts about the American continent, the Constitution, and everything which is related to these two subjects.
This has moved to the top of my list of ideological books that have a foundation in religion. I highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in the Constitution and/or America.
The best thing about this book is that once you are finished reading it, you will feel as if an entire world of thought which was previously unknown to you has been exposed to the point that it cannot be hid from you any longer. It really has opened my eyes to truths which I had not supposed existed. It really broadens your perspective on the stated subjects.
All in all, highly recommended to anyone who bothered to click on the link to read this far.
Average customer rating:
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Declaracion de Independencia y Constitucion de los Estados Unidos de America
Thomas Jefferson
Manufacturer: Cato Institute
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ASIN: 1930865511 |
Book Description
Translated into Spanish, with the English text, this pocket edition of America's founding documents is a must for every American citizen.
Customer Reviews:
A Book of Decisions.......2001-07-30
After reading the previous review I felt that prospective readers should know more of what this book contains. It is a volume that presents the actual majority and minority opinions of those Supreme Court decisions most significant in the field of constitutional law. Other books might, for instance, give you an analysis of the Dredd Scott decision, but this book presents the actual wording of Chief Justice Taney's opinion. About 100 cases are included, with the opinions edited to make them more manageable. It's an invaluable reference for those interested in some of the country's most important legal decisions. Its only deficiency is that it doesn't cover any cases after 1984.
If this book interests you, then you might also consider "The Constitution and Religion", edited by Robert S. Alley. It also consists of the actual opinions in cases involving the first amendment and religion. For analysis of cases and biographies of Supreme Court justices consider buying "The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court."
This book is really intresting........1997-08-16
I had to read excerpts from this book for a CTY course I took this summer. At the beginning it was really hard to read and I was getting fustrated with it, but after a little bit I got the hanf of it and I really enjoyed it. By the end of the course my whole class was having "Fun with Kutler"
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