The Interbellum Constitution

The Interbellum Constitution PDF

Author: Alison L LaCroix

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13: 0300223218

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A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity. The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles--commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity--concerned what we now call "federalism," meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today's constitutional debates admit. As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model--a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.

The Interbellum Constitution and the Spending Power

The Interbellum Constitution and the Spending Power PDF

Author: Alison L. LaCroix

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 47

ISBN-13:

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Today, the mechanism of the spending power drives the gears of the modern federal machine. But early nineteenth century constitutional debates demonstrate that the spending power is essentially a workaround, and a recent one at that - a tool by which Congress achieves certain political and legal ends while respecting the formal boundaries set by Article I and the Tenth Amendment. This 'interbellum' period was enormously significant for American constitutional law, in particular the constellation of related doctrines concerning congressional power that we now place under the general heading of 'federalism': the spending power, the enumerated powers of Article I, and the anticommandeering principle of the Tenth Amendment. As a historical matter, political and legal actors in the early nineteenth century believed themselves to be living in what this Article argues was a long founding moment, in which the fundamental terms of the federal-state relationship were still open to debate. Constitutional scholars have mistakenly overlooked the constitutional creativity of the period. As a normative matter, I argue for an approach to millennial constitutional interpretation that recognizes the ever-changing nature of the landscape of constitutional permissibility, and that offers documentary evidence of the precise contours of that change. Studying the evolution of the spending power over time, especially where the text itself remains constant, demonstrates that ideas about federal structure are not fixed. Therefore, constitutional federalism itself is not fixed - a particularly important insight in an area of constitutional doctrine that is dominated by originalist approaches.

How Constitutional Rights Matter

How Constitutional Rights Matter PDF

Author: Adam Chilton

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0190871458

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Does constitutionalizing rights improve respect for those rights in practice? Drawing on statistical analyses, survey experiments, and case studies from around the world, this book argues that enforcing constitutional rights is not easy, but that some rights are harder to repress than others. First, enshrining rights in constitutions does not automatically ensure that those rights will be respected. For rights to matter, rights violations need to be politically costly. But this is difficult to accomplish for unconnected groups of citizens. Second, some rights are easier to enforce than others, especially those with natural constituencies that can mobilize for their enforcement. This is the case for rights that are practiced by and within organizations, such as the rights to religious freedom, to unionize, and to form political parties. Because religious groups, trade unions and parties are highly organized, they are well-equipped to use the constitution to resist rights violations. As a result, these rights are systematically associated with better practices. By contrast, rights that are practiced on an individual basis, such as free speech or the prohibition of torture, often lack natural constituencies to enforce them, which makes it easier for governments to violate these rights. Third, even highly organized groups armed with the constitution may not be able to stop governments dedicated to rights-repression. When constitutional rights are enforced by dedicated organizations, they are thus best understood as speed bumps that slow down attempts at repression. An important contribution to comparative constitutional law, this book provides a comprehensive picture of the spread of constitutional rights, and their enforcement, around the world.

The Ideological Origins of American Federalism

The Ideological Origins of American Federalism PDF

Author: Alison L. LaCroix

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-10-15

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0674062035

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Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia. In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system. Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.

The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies

The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies PDF

Author: Aziz Z. Huq

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0197556817

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"This book describes and explains the failure of the federal courts of the United States to act and to provide remedies to individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated by illegal state coercion and violence. This remedial vacuum must be understood in light of the original design and historical development of the federal courts. At its conception, the federal judiciary was assumed to be independent thanks to an apolitical appointment process, a limited supply of adequately trained lawyers (which would prevent cherry-picking), and the constraining effect of laws and constitutional provision. Each of these checks quickly failed. As a result, the early federal judicial system was highly dependent on Congress. Not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a robust federal judiciary start to emerge, and not until the first quarter of the twentieth century did it take anything like its present form. The book then charts how the pressure from Congress and the White House has continued to shape courts behaviour-first eliciting a mid-twentieth-century explosion in individual remedies, and then driving a five-decade long collapse. Judges themselves have not avidly resisted this decline, in part because of ideological reasons and in part out of institutional worries about a ballooning docket. Today, as a result of these trends, the courts are stingy with individual remedies, but aggressively enforce the so-called "structural" constitution of the separation of powers and federalism. This cocktail has highly regressive effects, and is in urgent need of reform"--

How Antitrust Failed Workers

How Antitrust Failed Workers PDF

Author: Eric A. Posner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 019750762X

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"Antitrust law has very rarely been used by workers to challenge anticompetitive employment practices. Yet recent empirical research shows that labor markets are highly concentrated, and that employers engage in practices that harm competition and suppress wages. These practices include no-poaching agreements, wage-fixing, mergers, covenants not to compete, and misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors. This failure of antitrust to challenge labor-market misbehavior is due to a range of other failures-intellectual, political, moral, and economic. And the impact of this failure has been profound for wage levels, economic growth, and inequality. In light of the recent empirical work, it is urgent for regulators, courts, lawyers, and Congress to redirect antitrust resources to labor market problems. This book offers a strategy for judicial and legislative reform"--

The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution

The Antebellum Origins of the Modern Constitution PDF

Author: Simon J. Gilhooley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-29

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1108853412

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This book argues that conflicts over slavery and abolition in the early American Republic generated a mode of constitutional interpretation that remains powerful today: the belief that the historical spirit of founding holds authority over the current moment. Simon J. Gilhooley traces how debates around the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia gave rise to the articulation of this constitutional interpretation, which constrained the radical potential of the constitutional text. To reconstruct the origins of this interpretation, Gilhooley draws on rich sources that include historical newspapers, pamphlets, and congressional debates. Examining free black activism in the North, Abolitionism in the 1830s, and the evolution of pro-slavery thought, this book shows how in navigating the existence of slavery in the District and the fundamental constitutional issue of the enslaved's personhood, Antebellum opponents of abolition came to promote an enduring but constraining constitutional imaginary.

Constitutional Sentiments

Constitutional Sentiments PDF

Author: András Sajó

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0300168616

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Constitutional Sentiments provides new insights into the foundations of law, the complexities of legal institutions, and the hidden genealogies of lawmaking. As the book makes clear, constitutions are human creations that embody all aspects of our humanity. It is an example of serious scholarship that will attract readers of all disciplines who have a keen interest in social and political life. --Book Jacket.

Cannons and Codes

Cannons and Codes PDF

Author: Alison L. LaCroix

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0197509371

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This edited volume on war in law and literature addresses the many ways in which war affects human society and the many groups of people whose lives are affected by war. The essays, by preeminent scholars, discuss the ways in which literary works can shed light on legal thinking about war, and how a deep understanding of law can lead to interpretive insights on literary works. Some concern the lives of soldiers; others focus on civilians living in war zones, whoare caught up in the conflict; still others address themselves to the home front, far from the theatre of war. By collecting such diverse perspectives, with contributions from preeminent scholars of philosophy, literature, and law, this volume aims to show how literature has reflected the totalizingnature of war and the ways in which it distorts law across domains.

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