Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
Bezig met laden... The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (1998)door Akhil Reed Amar
Geen Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Prijzen
Are the deep insights of Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Felix Frankfurter that have defined our cherished Bill of Rights fatally flawed? With meticulous historical scholarship and elegant legal interpretation a leading scholar of Constitutional law boldly answers yes as he explodes conventional wisdom about the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution in this incisive new account of our most basic charter of liberty. Akhil Reed Amar brilliantly illuminates in rich detail not simply the text, structure, and history of individual clauses of the 1789 Bill, but their intended relationships to each other and to other constitutional provisions. Amar's corrective does not end there, however, for as his powerful narrative proves, a later generation of antislavery activists profoundly changed the meaning of the Bill in the Reconstruction era. With the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans underwent a new birth of freedom that transformed the old Bill of Rights.We have as a result a complex historical document originally designed to protect the people against self-interested government and revised by the Fourteenth Amendment to guard minority against majority. In our continuing battles over freedom of religion and expression, arms bearing, privacy, states' rights, and popular sovereignty, Amar concludes, we must hearken to both the Founding Fathers who created the Bill and their sons and daughters who reconstructed it.Amar's landmark work invites citizens to a deeper understanding of their Bill of Rights and will set the basic terms of debate about it for modern lawyers, jurists, and historians for years to come. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)342.73Social sciences Law Constitutional and administrative law North America Constitutional law--United StatesLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |
Throughout, Amar provides rich background, tying each clause of the Bill to the original Constitution, historical context, legal theory, and judicial opinio--background that enables a coherent and rich understanding of this vital document.
As a bonus, merely reading it, and it wasn't hard, Mr. Amar is witty and fluent and tremendously respectful of the reader, allowed me to read and undertand published U.S. Supreme Court opinions, no small feat itself.
While I was reading, the Supreme Court delivered a ruling that, for the first time, incorporated the Second Amendment (the right to "keep and bear arms") against the states via the 14th amendment, an important event that I would have taken no notice of prior to reading this--so an additional bonus in the form of an understanding of a current event going largely unreported.
Highly recommended. ( )