Constitutional History Books - Page 4

Democracy and the Constitution: Essays by Walter Berns (Landmarks of Contemporary Political Thought)

Walter Berns

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Important essays on the Constitution, Constitutionalism, and related issues 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

The strongest reaction I had as I read through the essays contained in this book was, "why wasn't I taught this information in any of the schooling I had growing up or in college?" I suspect that unless you have had an especially fortunate exposure to the actual history of the founding and the writing of our Constitution that you will have the same mix of shock and delight. It's not as if I haven't read anything about American history or that I haven't been open to hearing about these ideas. It is that I simply had not had them available to me. At least, if I read them or heard them anywhere they were drowned out by the constant beating of the progressive living Constitution drum.

Walter Berns is the John M. Olin Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and an AEI resident fellow. His entire career has been providing first rate scholarship on our Constitution. He has taught at other colleges, as well, and has his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In addition to being a Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Fellow, he received the National Humanities Medal in 2005.

This book contains twenty essays Dr. Berns has presented in various publications or as lectures. The essays are grouped into four parts. The first is on Constitutionalism, that is, various important aspects of what it means to have a Constitution, aspects of our Constitution, the difference between Natural Law and Locke's Law of Nature, and what the idea of multiculturalism can mean to the Constitution.

Without any background to the topics Berns is discussing, his concern for the possibility of Constitutionalism in a completely positivist and relativist culture takes a bit of orientation. However, once one gets one's bearings, it is a very important argument and concern. The fifth essay on the way the founders solved the problem of democracy in our representative republic is quite important. Our country was never meant to be a plebiscite, no matter what you hear on the even news about a poll saying the people want this or that and then browbeating the Congress, President, and Supreme Court to provide it.

The essays in Part II discuss aspects of the Constitution and our political system. I found the essay on why we have a Vice-President stunningly surprising. It turns out that it has nothing whatever to do with providing a replacement President. Instead it has to do with creating a majority support for the President when the natural tendency would be for each state to vote for its own candidate.

Berns also provides interesting essays on the Electoral College, protecting pornography in the name of free speech, the Pledge of Allegiance and the "Under God" controversy, teaching Patriotism and much more.

Part III has a very important essay on the assault on our Universities from the sixties until now. He also introduces what the toxin of Deconstructionism represents and the great influence of Paul De Man. He also discusses De Man's fall from Parnassus when it was discovered that he collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War.

He ends the book with two essays about people who were friends and influences in his life.

This book will have a prominent place on my bookshelves and I cannot imagine that you would not want to read these essays. They will contribute a great deal to your understanding of our Constitution and its historical and philosophical origins and how it compares to the hundreds of other constitutions tried around the world since it was written.

Strongly recommended.

Editorial Review:

For more than half a century, Walter Berns has been a leading authority on the Constitution. This volume collects many of his most important essays on timeless constitutional and political questions.

The Madisonian Constitution (The Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought)

George Thomas

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Today, we think of constitutional questions as being settled by the Supreme Court.But that is not always the case, nor is it what the framers intended in constructing the three-branch federal government. This volume examines four crucial moments in the United States' political history -- the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency and the New Deal, and the Reagan revolution -- to illustrate the Madisonian view that the present rise of judicial supremacy actually runs counter to the Constitution as established at the nation's founding.

George Thomas opens by discussing how the Constitution encourages an antagonistic approach to settling disputes, thereby preserving itself as the nation's fundamental law rather then ceding that role to the president, Congress, or Supreme Court. In considering the four historical case studies, he focuses on judicial interpretations and the political branches' responses to them to demonstrate that competing conceptions of constitutional authority and meaning, as well as intergovernmental disputes themselves -- rather than any specific outcome -- strengthen the nature of the nation's founding document as a political instrument.

Engagingly written and soundly argued, this study clarifies and highlights the political origins of the nation's foundational document and argues that American constitutionalism is primarily about countervailing power not legal limits enforced by courts.

British Government and the Constitution: Text, Cases and Materials (Law in Context)

Colin Turpin

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British Government and the Constitution 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

British Government and the Constitution: Text and Materials (Law in Context)

The Constitution of the United Kingdom: A Contextual Analysis (Constitutional Systems of the World)

This is one of the best books on UK's concept of constitutionalism. It deals with everything that one must know to understand the subject. As a text book, it deals with all nuances of constitutional politics that an academiic must be interested to know. The paraphas in boxed, especially of the great constitutional thinkers, judges and others, help the readers know the background of most of the topics included in it. For me, it was a great work updating all about what happended in this area in the United Kingdom since the last ten years - especially the changes brought about by the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005. I must say it has helped me a lot as a foreign lawyer.

Editorial Review:

This volume is a study of the British constitution, going beyond the strictly legal to look at the framework of constitutional theory, convention and political understanding within which British governments exercise their power. This edition has new chapters on remedies against public authorities and constitutional innovation and reform to give better coverage of the LLB Public Law syllabus.

Constitutionalism and Democracy (Studies in Rationality and Social Change)

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The eleven essays in this volume, supplemented by an editorial introduction, center around three overlapping problems. First, why would a society want to limit its own sovereign power by imposing constitutional constraints on democratic decision-making? Second, what are the contributions of democracy and constitutions to efficient government? Third, what are the relations among democracy, constitutionalism, and private property? This comprehensive discussion of the problems inherent in constitutional democracy will be of interest to students in a variety of social sciences. It illuminates particularly the current efforts of many countries, especially in Latin America, to establish stable democratic regimes.

Constitution of the Russian Federation: With Commentaries and Interpretation by American and Russian Scholars

Vladimir V. Belyakov, Walter J. Raymond

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Includes the text of the Russian Constitution translated into the English language; the December 1993 election results; and statistics, maps, charts, and selected historical information and commentaries by Russian and American scholars.

From Liberal Democracy to Fascism (Studies in German Histories)

Peter C. Caldwell, William E. Scheuerman

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Editorial Review:

The Weimar Republic from 1919 until 1933, when Hitler came into power witnessed crucial debates on law and politics. These debates are reexamined in this book. Were, for example, democratic rules and procedures an adequate basis for democracy, as Hugo Preuss and Hans Kelsen suggested? Or should constitutional law elaborate the deeper, basic principles embedded in the democratic constitution itself, as Hermann Heller argued? Was the president the immediate "guardian of the constitution," as Carl Schmitt's concept of "representation" suggested? Or was Schmitt's concept itself subject to Walter Benjamin's critique of the aura of authenticity? These, and other typical Weimar-era debates helped shape West German constitutionalism. The former labor lawyer on the left Ernst Fraenkel, for example, began to develop a general theory of dictatorship mass democracy while in exile, which influenced the new discipline of political science after the war. Similarly, Gerhard Leibholz, an anti-positivist lawyer in Weimar, served on the first Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany, helping to consolidate its new constitutional culture.

Guicciardini: Dialogue on the Government of Florence (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Francesco Guicciardini

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Editorial Review:

This is the first English translation of Guicciardini's Dialogue on the Government of Florence, written in the 1520s. Like Machiavelli, his more famous contemporary and friend, Guicciardini rejects classical republican arguments in the name of the new political realism and acknowledges the important role of patronage and graft in contemporary politics and the illegitimacy of nearly all forms of political power, arguing for the priority of state interest over private morality and religion.

The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century

Brendan Bradshaw

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Historiography has highlighted Ireland's sixteenth-century rebellions and ignored its revolution. The transformation of the island's political personality in the course of the middle Tudor period must be the last remarked-upon change in its whole history. Yet it might be claimed to be the most remarkable. It provided Ireland with its first sovereign constitution, gave it for the first time an ideology of nationalism, and proposed a practical political objective which has inspired and eluded a host of political movements ever since: the unification of the island's pluralistic community into a coherent political entity. The reason for the neglect lies partly in another remarkable feature of the revolution itself, the circumstances of its accomplishment. it was engineered by Anglo-Irish politicians, in collaboration with an English head of government in Ireland, and by constitutional means, in particular by parliamentary statute.

A Living Constitution or Fundamental Law?: American Constitutionalism in Historical Perspective

Herman Belz

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In A Living Constitution or Fundamental Law?, distinguished scholar Herman Belz considers the concept of constitutionalism as the subject matter of constitutional history. He argues that the study of constitutionalism should be interdisciplinary, requiring the insights and methods of history, political science, and jurisprudence. Belz illuminates the evolution of American constitutionalism across the span of American history, from the Founding to Reconstruction to the Cold War and the rise of the bureaucratic state in the 1980s.

Constitutions of the World

Robert L. Maddex

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From Algeria to Zimbabwe, Constitutions of the World is a guide to the constitutions and constitutional histories of eighty nations. It will prove an invaluable resource for any teacher or student interested in politics, law, human rights or the political history of nations across the world. Strucured alphabetically each chapter profiles one country in an easy-to-use format. For every country a wealth of information is to be found, including: * General Information: location, size, population, capital, economic and political status, type of government and dates of constitutions * Constitutional history: key historical and political events that provide a context for understanding the nation's current constitution and government * Influences: constitutions or principles of other countries that have had an impact on the nation's constitution as well as the ways in which it has affected others * Preamble to the constitution: the introduction to the country's sources of principles * Fundamental rights: statements of rights and freedoms held by individuals * Division of powers: the system of checks and balances within a national government as well as relations with its states or provinces * Structure of government: constitutional obligations of the executive, legislative and judicial branches, including special institutions such as ombudsmen that hear citizens' complaints as well as judicial and constitutional review powers * Amendments: procedures for amending or revising the constitution Special Strengths Wide ranging - the book has a special vantage point for comparing and contrasting scores of different countries, and from many different perspectives Comprehensive - it is a thorough and extensive reference source covering the historical development and role of constitutions across the world, and their prospects Accessible - Constitutions of the World also contains a useful chart comparing key elements of all eighty constitutions, allowing for quick comparisons at a glance.