[PDF] Interpreting Constitutions eBook

Author : Jeffrey Denys Goldsworthy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 25,59 MB
Release : 2006-02-09
Category : Law
ISBN : 0199274134

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This book describes the constitutions of six major federations and how they have been interpreted by their highest courts, compares the interpretive methods and underlying principles that have guided the courts, and explores the reasons for major differences between these methods and principles. Among the interpretive methods discussed are textualism, purposivism, structuralism and originalism. Each of the six federations is the subject of a separate chapter written by a leading authority in the field: Jeffrey Goldsworthy (Australia), Peter Hogg (Canada), Donald Kommers (Germany), S.P. Sathe (India), Heinz Klug (South Africa), and Mark Tushnet (United States). Each chapter describes not only the interpretive methodology currently used by the courts, but the evolution of that methodology since the constitution was first enacted. The book also includes a concluding chapter which compares these methodologies, and attempts to explain variations by reference to different social, historical, institutional and political circumstances.

Author : James A. Gardner
Publisher :
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 33,21 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Constitutional law
ISBN :

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Interpreting State Constitutions examines and proposes a solution to a problem central to contemporary debates over the enforcement of civil liberties: how courts, government officials, and lawyers should go about interpreting the constitutions of the American states. With the Supreme Court's retreat from the aggressive protection of individual rights, state courts have begun to interpret state constitutions to provide broader protection of liberties. This development has reversed the polarity of constitutional politics, as liberals advocate unimpeded state power while conservatives lobby for state subordination to a constitutional law controlled centrally by the Supreme Court. James A. Gardner here lays out the first fully developed theory of subnational constitutional interpretation. He argues that states are integral components of a national system of overlapping and mutually checking authority and that the purpose of this system is to protect liberty and defend against federal domination. The resulting account provides valuable prescriptive advice to state courts, showing them how to fulfill their responsibilities to the federal system in a way that strengthens American constitutional discourse.

Author : Jeffrey Goldsworthy
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 42,3 MB
Release : 2006-02-09
Category : Law
ISBN : 0191582441

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This book describes the constitutions of six major federations and how they have been interpreted by their highest courts, compares the interpretive methods and underlying principles that have guided the courts, and explores the reasons for major differences between these methods and principles. Among the interpretive methods discussed are textualism, purposivism, structuralism and originalism. Each of the six federations is the subject of a separate chapter written by a leading authority in the field: Jeffrey Goldsworthy (Australia), Peter Hogg (Canada), Donald Kommers (Germany), S.P. Sathe (India), Heinz Klug (South Africa), and Mark Tushnet (United States). Each chapter describes not only the interpretive methodology currently used by the courts, but the evolution of that methodology since the constitution was first enacted. The book also includes a concluding chapter which compares these methodologies, and attempts to explain variations by reference to different social, historical, institutional and political circumstances.

Author : Stephen Breyer
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 50,71 MB
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0307424618

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A brilliant new approach to the Constitution and courts of the United States by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.For Justice Breyer, the Constitution’s primary role is to preserve and encourage what he calls “active liberty”: citizen participation in shaping government and its laws. As this book argues, promoting active liberty requires judicial modesty and deference to Congress; it also means recognizing the changing needs and demands of the populace. Indeed, the Constitution’s lasting brilliance is that its principles may be adapted to cope with unanticipated situations, and Breyer makes a powerful case against treating it as a static guide intended for a world that is dead and gone. Using contemporary examples from federalism to privacy to affirmative action, this is a vital contribution to the ongoing debate over the role and power of our courts.

Author : Laurence H. TRIBE
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 16,5 MB
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0674044452

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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.

Author : Jaroslav Pelikan
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 230 pages
File Size : 46,96 MB
Release : 2008-10-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 0300130767

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Both the Bible and the Constitution have the status of “Great Code,” but each of these important texts is controversial as well as enigmatic. They are asked to speak to situations that their authors could not have anticipated on their own. In this book, one of our greatest religious historians brings his vast knowledge of the history of biblical interpretation to bear on the question of constitutional interpretation. Jaroslav Pelikan compares the methods by which the official interpreters of the Bible and the Constitution—the Christian Church and the Supreme Court, respectively—have approached the necessity of interpreting, and reinterpreting, their important texts. In spite of obvious differences, both texts require close, word-by-word exegesis, an awareness of opinions that have gone before, and a willingness to ask new questions of old codes, Pelikan observes. He probes for answers to the question of what makes something authentically “constitutional” or “biblical,” and he demonstrates how an understanding of either biblical interpretation or constitutional interpretation can illuminate the other in important ways.

Author : Kent Greenawalt
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 513 pages
File Size : 18,95 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Law
ISBN : 0199756155

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"Kent Greenawalt's Interpreting the Constitution combines a generalized account of the various approaches to interpretation with an examination of the major domains of American constitutional law. The third and capstone volume of his landmark series on legal interpretation, he utilizes numerous individual examples of decisions to illustrate his argument, which in combination demonstrate that his argument is undeniably in accord with the continuing practice of the United States Supreme Court over time. The book's central thesis is that strategies of constitutional interpretation cannot be simple and that judges must take account of multiple factors not systematically reducible to any clear ordering. For any constitution that lasts over centuries and which is hard to amend, original understanding cannot be completely determinative. To discern what that is, both how informed readers grasped a provision and what the enactors' aims were matter. Indeed, distinguishing these is usually extremely difficult, and often neither is really discernible. As time passes, what modern citizens understand becomes ever more important, diminishing the significance of original understanding. Simple versions of textualist originalism do not reflect changes in understanding over time and are therefore not really supportable. The focus on specific provision shows, among other things, the obstacles to discerning original understanding, and why the original sense of proper interpretation should itself carry importance. The scope of various provisions, such as those regarding free speech and cruel and unusual punishment, have expanded hugely since both 1791 and 1965. Even with respect to single provisions, such as the Free Speech Clause, interpretive approaches have sensibly varied, greatly depending on the particular issues at hand. How much deference judges should accord political actors also depends critically on the kind of issue involved. At once sweeping in scope and analytically powerful, this final volume cements Greenawalt's legacy as one of the leading legal scholars of this era"--Unedited summary from book jacket.

Author : Noah Feldman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 48,78 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 : Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 19,36 MB
Release : 2018-05-07
Category :
ISBN : 0190866063

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When we think of constitutional law, we invariably think of the United States Supreme Court and the federal court system. Yet much of our constitutional law is not made at the federal level. In 51 Imperfect Solutions, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton argues that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in protecting individual liberties. The book tells four stories that arise in four different areas of constitutional law: equal protection; criminal procedure; privacy; and free speech and free exercise of religion. Traditional accounts of these bedrock debates about the relationship of the individual to the state focus on decisions of the United States Supreme Court. But these explanations tell just part of the story. The book corrects this omission by looking at each issue-and some others as well-through the lens of many constitutions, not one constitution; of many courts, not one court; and of all American judges, not federal or state judges. Taken together, the stories reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system, one that ought to make lawyers and litigants pause before reflexively assuming that the United States Supreme Court alone has all of the answers to the most vexing constitutional questions. If there is a central conviction of the book, it's that an underappreciation of state constitutional law has hurt state and federal law and has undermined the appropriate balance between state and federal courts in protecting individual liberty. In trying to correct this imbalance, the book also offers several ideas for reform.

Author : Charles A. Beard
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 50,66 MB
Release : 2012-03-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0486140458

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This classic study — one of the most influential in the area of American economic history — questioned the founding fathers' motivations and prompted new perceptions of the supreme law of the land.