Alexander Hamilton wrote that “the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution.” If only that were true. The Founding Fathers wanted the judicial branch to serve as a check on the power of the legislative and executive, and gave the Supreme Court the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution in a way that would safeguard individual freedoms. In some cases, like Brown V. Board of Education and United State...

American Politics is full of dubious, perplexing and corrupt debates.However, as a democratic nation, it is absolutely necessary that we are well-versed with the concerns of our country.I have done research on the primary discussions going on in Washington at present and found three core policy matters. Summing up my study in a brief yet comprehensive document, I have presented views of both sides in a simplified manner.In just 1000 words you will u...

Contemporary democracies have granted an expansive amount of power to unelected judges that sit in constitutional or supreme courts. This power shift has never been easily squared with the institutional backbones through which democracy is popularly supposed to be structured. The best institutional translation of a 'government of the people, by the people and for the people' is usually expressed through elections and electoral representation in parliaments. Judicial review of legislation h...

The Quintessential Exploration of the Role of Violence in Protecting Civil Rights This enhanced edition includes an index. "I do not advocate violence for its own sake, or for the sake of reprisals against whites. Nor am I against the passive resistance advocated by the Reverend Martin Luther King," Robert F. Williams wrote in his prologue to Negroes with Guns. "But where there is a breakdown of the law, the individual citizen has a right to protect his person, his family, his home and his...

As everyone knows, the United States Constitution is a tangible, visible document. Many see it in fact as a sacred text, holding no meaning other than that which is clearly visible on the page. Yet as renowned legal scholar Laurence Tribe shows, what is not written in the Constitution plays a key role in its interpretation. Indeed some of the most contentious Constitutional debates of our time hinge on the extent to which it can admit of divergent readings. In The Invisible Constitutio...

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, t...

George Polk Award Winner: This account of American book banning and the battles against it is "a tour de force to fascinate lawyers and laymen alike" ( The New York Times Book Review).Up until the 1960s, depending on your state of residence, your copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer might be seized by the US Postal Service before reaching your mailbox. Selling copies of Cleland's Fanny Hill in your bookstore was considered illegal. ...

Former Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court Daniel O'Hern provides an insider's view about the secretive deliberations of his time on the New Jersey Supreme Court when it dealt with such monumental cases as Baby M. Harvard Professor, Laurence Tribe called the Court the Greatest Court in Land during Justice O'Hern's tenure. It is the Brethren of its day for one of the great State Supreme Court's in this history of the United States. It is a sharply written, intellectual, insightful, but ...

As constitutional law globalizes, the quest for a common grammar or 'generic constitutional law' becomes more pressing. Proportionality is one of the most prominent and controversial components of the modern, global constitutional discourse. In view of the alarming tension between the triumphant success of proportionality and the severity of the criticism directed towards it, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the critics of proportionality and demonstrates that their objections agai...

When the states ratified the Bill of Rights in the eighteenth century, the Fourth Amendment seemed straightforward. It requires that government respect the right of citizens to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Of course, "papers and effects" are now digital and thus more vulnerable to government spying. But the biggest threat may be our own weakening resolve to preserve our privacy. In this potent new volume in Oxford's ...

In a comprehensive examination of the constitutional systems of Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, Po Jen Yap contributes to a field that has traditionally focussed on Western jurisdictions. Drawing on the history and constitutional framework of these Asian law systems, this book examines the political structures and traditions that were inherited from the British colonial government and the major constitutional developments since decolonization. Yap examines the judicial crises that have...

Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places argues that we have fundamentally misunderstoo...