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Review Of Encyclopedia Of The U.S. Census: From The Constitution To The American Community Survey Ed. By Margo J. Anderson, Constance F. Citro, And Joseph J. Salvo, Rebecca Tolley Oct 2019

Review Of Encyclopedia Of The U.S. Census: From The Constitution To The American Community Survey Ed. By Margo J. Anderson, Constance F. Citro, And Joseph J. Salvo, Rebecca Tolley

Rebecca Tolley

Review of Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census : From the Constitution to the American Community Survey 2nd Ed. Margo J. Anderson, Constance F. Citro, and Joseph J. Salvo. 2011. 456p, 1608710254, $175.00


The Constitution's Forgotten Cover Letter: An Essay On The New Federalism And The Original Understanding, Daniel A. Farber Aug 2019

The Constitution's Forgotten Cover Letter: An Essay On The New Federalism And The Original Understanding, Daniel A. Farber

Daniel A Farber

At the end of the summer of 1787, the Philadelphia Convention issued two documents. One was the Constitution itself. The other document, now almost forgotten even by constitutional historians, was an official letter to Congress, signed by George Washington on behalf of the Convention. Congress responded with a resolution that the Constitution and "letter accompanying the same" be sent to the state legislatures for submission to conventions in each state.

The Washington letter lacks the detail and depth of some other evidence of original intent. Being a cover letter, it was designed only to introduce the accompanying document rather than …


Amending The Constitution, Erwen Chemerinsky Aug 2019

Amending The Constitution, Erwen Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky

The ultimate measure of a constitution is how it balances entrenchment and change. On the one hand, a constitution differs from all other laws in that it is much more difficult to revise. For example, the next session of Congress can amend or repeal a statute, but altering the U.S. Constitution requires a complex process involving supermajorities of both houses of Congress and the states. A constitution thus reflects a desire to place a society's core values of governance - such as the structure of government and the rights of individuals - in a document that is hard to revise. …


The Iraq Paradox: Minority And Group Rights In A Viable Constitution, Makau Mutua Jul 2019

The Iraq Paradox: Minority And Group Rights In A Viable Constitution, Makau Mutua

Makau Mutua

On October 15, 2005 an Iraq ravaged by a civil war spawned by the 2003 American invasion and subsequent occupation voted to decide the fate of a permanent constitution for the country. Although many Sunni Arabs took part in the vote, the referendum lost in the three governorates where they form a majority. But the constitution was approved because opponents only succeeded in recording "no" votes larger than two-thirds in only two of Iraq's eighteen provinces, in effect one province short of a veto. A two-thirds rejection in three provinces would have doomed the charter and the transition to a …


How The United States Supreme Court Diminished Constitutional Protections Of The Right To Vote And What Congress Can Do About It, Henry Rose Jul 2019

How The United States Supreme Court Diminished Constitutional Protections Of The Right To Vote And What Congress Can Do About It, Henry Rose

Henry Rose

No abstract provided.


The Declaration Of Independence As Introduction To The Constitution, Alexander Tsesis Jun 2019

The Declaration Of Independence As Introduction To The Constitution, Alexander Tsesis

Alexander Tsesis

No abstract provided.


Twenty-First Century Noir: From Stieg Larsson’S Trilogy To Dolores Redondo’S Trilogy And Eva García Sáenz De Urturi’S Trilogy, Salvador Oropesa Jun 2019

Twenty-First Century Noir: From Stieg Larsson’S Trilogy To Dolores Redondo’S Trilogy And Eva García Sáenz De Urturi’S Trilogy, Salvador Oropesa

Salvador Oropesa

Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy has influenced twenty-first century Spanish noir, especially Dolores Redondo’s Baztán Trilogy and Eva García Sáenz de Urturi’s White City Trilogies. Larsson’s novels put mysoginy and its violent consequences at the center of noir and provided the development of constitutional rights as the solution to the problem. Following the logic of Western literature, all these texts use myths to make sense of modern problems. Pre-Christian mythology is presented as the root of contemporary evil acts. The novels warn their readers that the return to an ahistorical past and magic brings abomination and inordinate pain. In the …


The Constitution As Poetry, Samuel J. Levine Mar 2019

The Constitution As Poetry, Samuel J. Levine

Samuel J. Levine

Building upon a body of scholarship that compares constitutional interpretation to biblical and literary interpretation, and relying on an insight from a prominent nineteenth century rabbinic scholar, this Article briefly explores similarities in the interpretation of the Torah—the text of the Five Books of Moses—and the United States Constitution. Specifically, this Article draws upon Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin’s (“Netziv”) intriguing suggestion that the interpretation of the text of the Torah parallels the interpretation of poetry. According to Netziv, this parallel accounts for the practice of interpreting the Torah expansively in ways that derive substantive legal rules and principles far …


What Is The Best Model For Investigating Presidential Wrongdoing Today, Bruce Ledewitz Dec 2018

What Is The Best Model For Investigating Presidential Wrongdoing Today, Bruce Ledewitz

Bruce Ledewitz

The roundtable discussion, Special Counsel Investigations and Legal Ethics, of which this essay is a component, could hardly have raised a more urgent issue for American public life in our time. On May 17, 2017, only four months into the presidency of Donald Trump, and shortly after President Trump's dismissal of F.B.I. Director James Comey created a crisis of confidence in the ability of the Justice Department to investigate, fully and fairly, alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials prior to the 2016 election, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller III as Special Counsel to conduct the investigation. …


Taking The Threat To Democracy Seriously, Bruce Ledewitz Dec 2018

Taking The Threat To Democracy Seriously, Bruce Ledewitz

Bruce Ledewitz

During the summer of 2018, I had occasion to write a book review of How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The book has its flaws, including practicing the kind of partisanship that it highlights and claims to deplore. But, whatever the book’s flaws, Levitsky and Ziblatt clearly demonstrate that it can happen here—our democracy can actually die—by contrasting the decline of democratic norms in America over the past forty-five years with countries in which similar experiences led to dictatorial rule. According to the authors, the fundamental change that explains the end of democratic systems is the decline …


What Has Gone Wrong And Can We Do About It, Bruce Ledewitz Dec 2018

What Has Gone Wrong And Can We Do About It, Bruce Ledewitz

Bruce Ledewitz

It is a mark of how bad things are in American public life that most people who read the title of this book review will immediately understand that it refers to the current state of politics in the United States. Here is how Lawrence Lessig describes our condition in America, Compromised, one of the three books discussed in this review:

"There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things
are. Every one of us has a sense-if only a sense-that with our nation, something is not
quite right.. ..We've not been as …