[PDF] Lincoln And The Courts eBook

Author : Brian McGinty
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 50,45 MB
Release : 2009-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0674040821

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In a meticulously researched and engagingly written narrative, Brian McGinty rescues the story of Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court from long and undeserved neglect, recounting the compelling history of the Civil War president's relations with the nation's highest tribunal and the role it played in resolving the agonizing issues raised by the conflict. Lincoln was, more than any other president in the nation's history, a "lawyerly" president, the veteran of thousands of courtroom battles, where victories were won, not by raw strength or superior numbers, but by appeals to reason, citations of precedent, and invocations of justice. He brought his nearly twenty-five years of experience as a practicing lawyer to bear on his presidential duties to nominate Supreme Court justices, preside over a major reorganization of the federal court system, and respond to Supreme Court decisions--some of which gravely threatened the Union cause. The Civil War was, on one level, a struggle between competing visions of constitutional law, represented on the one side by Lincoln's insistence that the United States was a permanent Union of one people united by a "supreme law," and on the other by Jefferson Davis's argument that the United States was a compact of sovereign states whose legal ties could be dissolved at any time and for any reason, subject only to the judgment of the dissolving states that the cause for dissolution was sufficient. Alternately opposed and supported by the justices of the Supreme Court, Lincoln steered the war-torn nation on a sometimes uncertain, but ultimately triumphant, path to victory, saving the Union, freeing the slaves, and preserving the Constitution for future generations.

Author : David Mayer Silver
Publisher : Urbana : University of Illinois Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 40,99 MB
Release : 1956
Category : United States
ISBN :

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An examination of the justices in the Supreme Court who served during America's darkest hour, and how Lincoln was able to govern effectively, even though he stretched his Constitutional authority to the limits.

Author : Noah Feldman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 47,89 MB
Release : 2021-11-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0374720878

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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution—a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them—and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

Author : David Mayer Silver
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 40,48 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 9780252067198

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More than four decades after its initial publication this book is still the only one to focus exclusively on President Abraham Lincoln's role in modifying the Supreme Court membership to secure the power he needed to save the Union.

Author : Frank J. Williams
Publisher : SIU Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 27,99 MB
Release : 2002-09-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0809389258

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Judging Lincoln collects nine of the most insightful essays on the topic of the sixteenth president written by Frank J. Williams, chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and one of the nation’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln. For Judge Williams, Lincoln remains the central figure of the American experience—past, present, and future. Williams begins with a survey of the interest in—and influence of—Lincoln both at home and abroad and then moves into an analysis of Lincoln’s personal character with respect to his ability to foster relationships of equality among his intimates. Williams then addresses Lincoln’s leadership abilities during the span of his career, with particular emphasis on the Civil War. Next, he compares the qualities of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. The final essay, cowritten with Mark E. Neely Jr., concerns collecting Lincoln artifacts as a means of preserving and fostering the Lincoln legacy.

Author : Roger Billings
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 420 pages
File Size : 37,75 MB
Release : 2010-11-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0813139937

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Lincoln scholars explore the president’s law career in this informative volume, examining his legal writings on matters from ethics to the Constitution. As our nation's most beloved and recognizable president, Abraham Lincoln is best known for the Emancipation Proclamation and for guiding our country through the Civil War. But before he took the oath of office, Lincoln practiced law for nearly twenty-five years in the Illinois courts. In Abraham Lincoln, Esq., notable historiansexamine Lincoln's law practice and the effect it had on his presidency and the country. This volume offers new perspectives on Lincoln’s work in Illinois as well as his time in Washington. Each chapter offers an expansive look at Lincoln's legal mind and covers diverse topics such as Lincoln's legal writing, ethics, Constitutional law, and international law. Abraham Lincoln, Esq. emphasizes this overlooked period in Lincoln's career and sheds light on Lincoln's life before he became America’s sixteenth president.

Author : Brian McGinty
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 17,29 MB
Release : 2015-02-09
Category : History
ISBN : 087140785X

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The untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight. In May of 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge, unalterably changing the course of American transportation history. Within a year, long-simmering tensions between powerful steamboat interests and burgeoning railroads exploded, and the nation’s attention, absorbed by the Dred Scott case, was riveted by a new civil trial. Dramatically reenacting the Effie Afton case—from its unlikely inception, complete with a young Abraham Lincoln’s soaring oratory, to the controversial finale—this “masterful” (Christian Science Monitor) account gives us the previously untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight.

Author : Abraham Lincoln
Publisher :
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 38,79 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Law
ISBN :

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Many in politics began their careers in the law; no one has cut such a distinguished path in this regard as Abraham Lincoln. Before his presidency, from 1836 to 1861, Lincoln practiced law in the courts of central Illinois. Part of an ambitious undertaking to collect and publish the surviving documentary record of Lincoln’s life, this four-volume set addresses his quarter-century law career. Arranged chronologically, the four volumes present documents from more than fifty of Lincoln’s most interesting, important, or representative cases, all of which are transcribed and annotated. The edition features illuminating essays on Lincoln’s career as a lawyer and as a court official, as well as a biographical directory, an extensive legal glossary, and a cumulative index covering all four volumes.

Author : Daniel W. Stowell
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 40,93 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Women
ISBN : 9780252027024

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From debt to divorce, from adultery to slander, cases with women as plaintiffs, defendants, or both appeared regularly on docket books in antebellum Illinois. Nearly one-fifth of Abraham Lincoln's cases involved women as litigants, and during the twenty-five years of his legal career thousands of women appeared in Illinois courts, as litigants, criminal defendants, witnesses, and spectators. Drawing on the rich resources of The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition, a DVD version of Lincoln's complete legal papers, In Tender Consideration scans the full range of family woes that antebellum Americans took to the law. Deserted wives, destitute widows, jilted brides with illegitimate children, and slandered women brought their cases before the courts, often receiving a surprising degree of sympathy and support. Through the stories of dozens of individuals who took legal action to obtain a divorce, contest a will, prosecute a rapist, or assert rights to family property, this volume illuminates the legal status of women and children in Illinois and their experiences with the law in action. to inheritance, custody, and other types of cases involving children or their interests. These cases also highlight Lincoln's life in law, placing him more clearly within the context of the legal culture in which he lived and raising intriguing questions about the influence of his legal life on his subsequent political one.