constructing civil liberties discontinuities in the development of american constitutional law

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This Encyclopedia on American history and law is the first devoted to examining the issues of civil liberties and their relevance to major current events while providing a historical context and a philosophical discussion of the evolution of civil liberties.  Coverage includes the traditional civil liberties: freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition.  In addition, it also covers concerns such as privacy, the rights of the accused, and national security.  Alphabetically organized for ease of access, the articles range in length from 250 words for a brief biography to 5,000 words for in-depth analyses.  Entries are organized around the following themes: organizations and government bodies legislation and legislative action, statutes, and acts historical overviews biographies cases themes, issues, concepts, and events.  The Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties is an essential reference for students and researchers as well as for the general reader to help better understand the world we live in today. 

Originally published in 2006, the Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties, is a comprehensive 3 volume set covering a broad range of topics in the subject of American Civil Liberties.  The book covers the topic from numerous different areas including freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly and petition.  The Encyclopedia also addresses areas such as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, slavery, censorship, crime and war.  The book’s multidisciplinary approach will make it an ideal library reference resource for lawyers, scholars and students. 

The United States has had not one, but two Foundings.  The Constitution produced by the Second Founding came to be only after a vociferous battle between Federalists and Anti-Federalists.  The Federalists favored a relatively powerful central government, while the Anti-Federalists distrusted the concentration of power in one place and advocated the preservation of sovereignty in the states as crucibles of post-revolutionary republicanism -- the legacy of the First Founding.  This philosophical cleavage has been at the heart of practically every major political conflict in U.S. history, and lives on today in debates between modern liberals and conservatives.  In The Lovers' Quarrel, Elvin T. Lim presents a systematic and innovative analysis of this perennial struggle.  The framers of the second Constitution, the Federalists, were not operating in an ideational or institutional vacuum; rather, the document they drafted and ratified was designed to remedy the perceived flaws of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.  To decouple the Two Foundings is to appreciate that there is no such thing as "original meaning," only original dissent.  Because the Anti-Federalists insisted that prior and democratically sanctioned understandings of federalism and union had to be negotiated and partially grafted onto the new Constitution, the Constitution's Articles and the Bill of Rights do not cohere as well together as has conventionally been thought.  Rather, they represent two antithetical orientations toward power, liberty, and republicanism.  The altercation over the necessity of the Second Founding generated coherent and self-contained philosophies that would become the core of American political thought, reproduced and transmitted across two centuries, whether the victors were the neo-Federalists (such as during the Civil War and the New Deal) or the neo-Anti-Federalists (such as during the Jacksonian era and the Reagan Revolution).  The Second Founding -- the sole "founding" that we generally speak of -- would become a template for the unique, prototypically American species of politics and political debate.  Because of it, American political development occurs only after the political entrepreneurs of each generation lock horns in a Lovers' Quarrel about the principles of one of the Two Foundings, and succeed in justifying and forging a durable expansion or contraction of federal authority. 

This book reinterprets the rise of the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern America.  Andrew Jewett demonstrates the remarkable persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic culture - a political function widely assigned to religion.  The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold War years.  It examines hundreds of leading scholars who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge, but also as a resource for fostering cultural change.  This vision generated surprisingly nuanced portraits of science in the years before the military-industrial complex and has much to teach us today about the relationship between science and democracy. 

This newly revised and expanded edition ofThe Bill of Rights in Modern Americacaptures the noisy and potentially defining national debate about the nature and extent of our individual rights.  Free speech, the separation of church and state, public safety and gun control, property rights, the rights of criminals and victims, the limits of law enforcement, the death penalty, affirmative action, the right to privacy, abortion, states' rights-the Bill of Rights has been evoked as the legal basis for every one of these issues.  Twelve distinguished legal scholars discuss the history and the current debates on these and other important rights issues in a book that is certain to stimulate thoughtful discussion among all citizens. 

American constitutional lawyers and legal historians routinely assert that the Supreme Court's state action doctrine halted Reconstruction in its tracks.  But it didn't.  Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction demolishes the conventional wisdom - and puts a constructive alternative in its place.  Pamela Brandwein unveils a lost jurisprudence of rights that provided expansive possibilities for protecting blacks' physical safety and electoral participation, even as it left public accommodation rights undefended.  She shows that the Supreme Court supported a Republican coalition and left open ample room for executive and legislative action.  Blacks were abandoned, but by the president and Congress, not the Court.  Brandwein unites close legal reading of judicial opinions (some hitherto unknown), sustained historical work, the study of political institutions, and the sociology of knowledge.  This book explodes tired old debates and will provoke new ones.