Constitutional category: 1750 books
Plessy v. Ferguson
Race and Inequality in Jim Crow America
Language: English
Release Date: April 16, 2012
Six decades before Rosa Parks boarded her fateful bus, another traveler in the Deep South tried to strike a blow against racial discrimination—but ultimately fell short of that goal, leading to the Supreme Court's landmark 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Now Williamjames Hull Hoffer vividly...
Liberty and Sexuality
The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade
Language: English
Release Date: July 7, 2015
Pulitzer Prize–winning author David J. Garrow’s stirring and essential history of the politics of abortion and America’s battle for the right to choose
In 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, and more than forty years later the issue...
by Kurt T. Lash
Language: English
Release Date: March 27, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: March 27, 2009
The Ninth Amendment has had a remarkably robust history, playing a role in almost every significant constitutional debate in American history, including the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts, the struggle over slavery, and the constitutionality of the New Deal. Until very recently, however,...
The Wisest Council in the World
Restoring the Character Sketches by William Pierce of Georgia of the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787
Language: English
Release Date: June 15, 2015
Of all the written portraits of the delegates who attended the Federal Convention of 1787, few are as complete and compelling as those penned by William Pierce Jr. (1753–89), one of four delegates from Georgia. While at the convention or shortly thereafter, Pierce produced character sketches of...
by Daniel Dreisbach
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2002
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2002
No phrase in American letters has had a more profound influence on church-state law, policy, and discourse than Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state,” and few metaphors have provoked more passionate debate. Introduced in an 1802 letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptist...
by Kate Elizabeth Brown
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2017
Alexander Hamilton is commonly seen as the standard-bearer of an ideology-turned-political party, the Federalists, engaged in a struggle for the soul of the young United States against the Anti-Federalists, and later, the Jeffersonian Republicans. Alexander Hamilton and the Development of American...
The Framers' Coup
The Making of the United States Constitution
Language: English
Release Date: September 16, 2016
Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them "all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local...
Ashes and Sparks
Essays On Law and Justice
Language: English
Release Date: February 24, 2011
As a practising barrister, the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Sedley wrote widely on legal and non-legal matters, and continued to do so after becoming a judge in 1992. This anthology contains classic articles, previously unpublished essays and lecture transcripts. To each, he has added reflections on what...
The White House Vice Presidency
The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden
Language: English
Release Date: March 11, 2016
“I am nothing, but I may be everything,” John Adams, the first vice president, wrote of his office. And for most of American history, the “nothing” part of Adams’s formulation accurately captured the importance of the vice presidency, at least as long as the president had a heartbeat. But...
An Argument Open to All
Reading "The Federalist" in the 21st Century
Language: English
Release Date: November 24, 2015
In An Argument Open to All, renowned legal scholar Sanford Levinson takes a novel approach to what is perhaps America’s most famous political tract. Rather than concern himself with the authors as historical figures, or how The Federalist helps us understand the original intent of the framers of...
Harry A. Blackmun
The Outsider Justice
Language: English
Release Date: January 15, 2008
When appointed to the Supreme Court in 1970 by President Nixon, Harry A. Blackmun was seen as a quiet, safe choice to complement the increasingly conservative Court of his boyhood friend, Warren Burger. No one anticipated his seminal opinion championing abortion rights in Roe v. Wade, the most controversial...
To End a Presidency
The Power of Impeachment
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2018
The history and future of our democracy's ultimate sanction, presidential impeachment, and a guide to how it should be used now
To End a Presidency addresses one of today's most urgent questions: when and whether to impeach a president. Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz provide an authoritative...
The Constitution
An Introduction
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2017
From war powers to health care, freedom of speech to gun ownership, religious liberty to abortion, practically every aspect of American life is shaped by the Constitution. This vital document, along with its history of political and judicial interpretation, governs our individual lives and the life...
The People Themselves
Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review
Language: English
Release Date: June 10, 2004
In this groundbreaking interpretation of America's founding and of its entire system of judicial review, Larry Kramer reveals that the colonists fought for and created a very different system--and held a very different understanding of citizenship--than Americans believe to be the norm today. "Popular...