Supreme Inequality

Supreme Inequality
Author: Adam Cohen
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0735221529

“With Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen has built, brick by brick, an airtight case against the Supreme Court of the last half-century...Cohen’s book is a closing statement in the case against an institution tasked with protecting the vulnerable, which has emboldened the rich and powerful instead.” —Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years. In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair. A triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land and shows how much damage it has done to America’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice for all.

The Oxford Handbook of the U.S. Constitution

The Oxford Handbook of the U.S. Constitution
Author: Mark Tushnet
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1110
Release: 2015-07-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 019024576X

The Oxford Handbook of the U.S. Constitution offers a comprehensive overview and introduction to the U.S. Constitution from the perspectives of history, political science, law, rights, and constitutional themes, while focusing on its development, structures, rights, and role in the U.S. political system and culture. This Handbook enables readers within and beyond the U.S. to develop a critical comprehension of the literature on the Constitution, along with accessible and up-to-date analysis. The historical essays included in this Handbook cover the Constitution from 1620 right through the Reagan Revolution to the present. Essays on political science detail how contemporary citizens in the United States rely extensively on political parties, interest groups, and bureaucrats to operate a constitution designed to prevent the rise of parties, interest-group politics and an entrenched bureaucracy. The essays on law explore how contemporary citizens appear to expect and accept the exertions of power by a Supreme Court, whose members are increasingly disconnected from the world of practical politics. Essays on rights discuss how contemporary citizens living in a diverse multi-racial society seek guidance on the meaning of liberty and equality, from a Constitution designed for a society in which all politically relevant persons shared the same race, gender, religion and ethnicity. Lastly, the essays on themes explain how in a "globalized" world, people living in the United States can continue to be governed by a constitution originally meant for a society geographically separated from the rest of the "civilized world." Whether a return to the pristine constitutional institutions of the founding or a translation of these constitutional norms in the present is possible remains the central challenge of U.S. constitutionalism today.

Welfare

Welfare
Author: Gwendolyn Mink
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 845
Release: 2003-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814756530

A documentary history of welfare policy in the U.S.

The Burger Court

The Burger Court
Author: Charles M. Lamb
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1991
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780252061356

This volume offers valuable insights into the thirteen justices who served on the Supreme Court while Warren E. Burger was chief justice, from 1969 to 1986. Each chapter focuses on one of the thirteen, beginning with a brief introduction and biographical sketch and then analyzing the individual justice's contributions to major areas and issues of constitutional law.

Mr. Justice Black and His Critics

Mr. Justice Black and His Critics
Author: Tinsley E. Yarbrough
Publisher: Durham : Duke University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1988
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Many jurists give lip service to the idea that judicial interpretation of constitutional provisions should be based on the intent of the framers. Few, if any, have been as faithful to that conception as Hugo Black, a U.S. Senator from Alabama. Once on the court, he played a leading role in establishing freedom of speech and other guarantees the interpretation he (and others) believed were warranted by the language and intent of the framers. Late in his career, however, Black's commitment to literalism and intent led him to assume apparently conservative positions in civil liberties cases. The author analyzes Black's judicial and constitutional philosophy, as well as his approach to specific cases, through the eyes of Black's critics and through an assessment of scholarly opinion of his jurisprudence. -- from book jacket.

Property Rights

Property Rights
Author: Bernard Siegan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1351325949

Property Rights: From Magna Carta to the Fourteenth Amendment breaks new ground in our understanding of the genesis of property rights in the United States. According to the standard interpretation, echoed by as lofty an authority as Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the courts did little in the way of protecting property rights in the early years of our nation. Not only does Siegan find this accepted teaching erroneous, but he finds post-Colonial jurisprudence to be firmly rooted in English common law and the writings of its most revered interpreters. Siegan conducts an exhaustive examination of property rights cases decided by state courts between the time of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. This inventory, which in its sweep captures scores of cases overlooked by previous commentators on the history of property rights, reveals that the protection of these rights is neither a relatively new phenomenon nor a heritage with precarious pedigree. These court cases, as well as early state constitutions, consistently and repeatedly embraced key elements of a property rights jurisprudence, such as protection of the privileges and immunities of citizens, due process of law, equal protection under the law, and prohibitions on the taking of property without just compensation. Case law provides overwhelming evidence that the American legal system, from its inception, has held property rights and their protection in the highest regard.The American Revolution, Siegan reminds us, was fought largely to affirm and protect private property rights-that is, to uphold the "rights of Englishmen"-even if it meant that the colonists would cease being Englishmen. John Locke and other great theoreticians of property rights understood their importance, not only to individuals who happened to possess property, but to the preservation of a free society and to the prosperity of its inhabitants. Siegan's contribution to this venerable tradition lies in his faithful reconstruction of our legal history, which allows us to see just how central property rights have been to the American experiment in liberty-from the very beginning.