[PDF] Liberty Property And The Foundations Of The American Constitution eBook

Author : Ellen Frankel Paul
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 19,65 MB
Release : 1989-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780887069154

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Cover title: Liberty, property & the foundations of the American constitution. Includes bibliographies and index.

Author : Timothy Sandefur
Publisher : Cato Institute
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 19,49 MB
Release : 2006-10-25
Category : Law
ISBN : 1933995327

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The right to own and use private property is among the most essential human rights and the essential basis for economic growth. That’s why America’s Founders guaranteed it in the Constitution. Yet in today’s America, government tramples on this right in countless ways. Regulations forbid people to use their property as they wish, bureaucrats extort enormous fees from developers in exchange for building permits, and police departments snatch personal belongings on the suspicion that they were involved in crimes. In the case of Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court even declared that government may seize homes and businesses and transfer the land to private developers to build stores, restaurants, or hotels. That decision was met with a firestorm of criticism across the nation. In this, the first book on property rights to be published since the Kelo decision, Timothy Sandefur surveys the landscape of private property in America’s third century. Beginning with the role property rights play in human nature, Sandefur describes how America’s Founders wrote a Constitution that would protect this right and details the gradual erosion that began with the Progressive Era’s abandonment of the principles of individual liberty. Sandefur tells the gripping stories of people who have found their property threatened: Frank Bugryn and his Connecticut Christmas-tree farm; Susette Kelo and the little dream house she renovated; Wilhelmina Dery and the house she was born in, 80 years before bureaucrats decided to take it; Dorothy English and the land she wanted to leave to her children; and Kenneth Healing and his 17-year legal battle for permission to build a home. Thanks to the abuse of eminent domain and asset forfeiture laws, federal, state, and local governments have now come to see property rights as mere permissions, which can be revoked at any time in the name of the “greater good.” In this book, Sandefur explains what citizens can do to restore the Constitution’s protections for this “cornerstone of liberty.”

Author : Ellen Frankel Paul
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 31,20 MB
Release : 1990-07-05
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780791403044

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This book is a discussion of current trends in the constitutional protection of economic liberties. Since the mid-1930’s, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to replace legislative judgements on matters of economic regulation with its own. While the Court permits wide legislative experimentation in the economic realm, it scrutinizes governmental attempts to regulate or abridge other civil liberties quite closely. This state of affairs is known as the “double standard.” The question of the appropriateness of this unequal treatment by the Court of these two classes of liberties generates much of the controversy in this volume. Other topics dealt with include the current trends in (and relevance of) constitutional law for welfare rights, labor unions, and labor law. Recent Supreme Court decisions on property rights also receive much attention.

Author : Timothy Sandefur
Publisher : Cato Institute
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 48,69 MB
Release : 2013-11-12
Category : Law
ISBN : 1939709040

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The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty documents a forgotten truth: the word “democracy” is nowhere to be found in either the Constitution or the Declaration. But it is the overemphasis of democracy by the legal community–rather than the primacy of liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence–that has led to the growth of government power at the expense of individual rights. Now, more than ever, Sandefur explains, the Declaration of Independence should set the framework for interpreting our fundamental law. In the very first sentence of the Constitution, the founding fathers stated unambiguously that “liberty” is a blessing. Today, more and more Americans are realizing that their individual freedoms are being threatened by the ever-expanding scope of the government. Americans have always differed over important political issues, but some things should not be settled by majority vote. In The Conscience of the Constitution, Timothy Sandefur presents a dramatic new challenge to the status quo of constitutional law.

Author : Richard A. Epstein
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 430 pages
File Size : 48,55 MB
Release : 2013-10-15
Category : Law
ISBN : 1135699933

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First Published in 2000. This is a collection of essays that look at the Constitutional protection of private property and freedom of contract, and forms part of the Liberty, Property and Law series where the materials in this collection are drawn from many disciplines, including economics, law, philosophy and political science.

Author : John Phillip Reid
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 11,63 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780226708966

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"Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by English-speaking people in the eighteenth century. It was both an ideal for the guidance of governors and a standard with which to measure the constitutionality of government; both a cause of the American Revolution and a purpose for drafting the United States Constitution; both an inheritance from Great Britain and a reason republican common lawyers continued to study the law of England." As John Philip Reid goes on to make clear, "liberty" did not mean to the eighteenth-century mind what it means today. In the twentieth century, we take for granted certain rights—such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press—with which the state is forbidden to interfere. To the revolutionary generation, liberty was preserved by curbing its excesses. The concept of liberty taught not what the individual was free to do but what the rule of law permitted. Ultimately, liberty was law—the rule of law and the legalism of custom. The British constitution was the charter of liberty because it provided for the rule of law. Drawing on an impressive command of the original materials, Reid traces the eighteenth-century notion of liberty to its source in the English common law. He goes on to show how previously problematic arguments involving the related concepts of licentiousness, slavery, arbitrary power, and property can also be fit into the common-law tradition. Throughout, he focuses on what liberty meant to the people who commented on and attempted to influence public affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. He shows the depth of pride in liberty—English liberty—that pervaded the age, and he also shows the extent—unmatched in any other era or among any other people—to which liberty both guided and motivated political and constitutional action.

Author : Ellen Frankel Paul
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 20,82 MB
Release : 1989-07-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780791400876

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This book examines the constitutional protection of economic rights through the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth. The authors grapple with such questions as: how should the commerce clause be interpreted? To what extent did the historical development of eminent domain law depart from the “rhetoric” of takings jurisprudence? How was the Constitution connected to economic growth in the nineteenth century? What was the effect of the post-/civil War constitutional amendments? How did the right to contract affect government attempts to balance private rights with the public good? What was the reaction of leading constitutional theorists to the dominance of a laissez-fair philosophy in the Court and the nation at the turn of the century?