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Constitutional Law

Columbia Law School

Vermont Law Review

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Confusing Punishment With Custodial Care: The Troublesome Legacy Of Estelle V. Gamble, Philip Genty Jan 1996

Confusing Punishment With Custodial Care: The Troublesome Legacy Of Estelle V. Gamble, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

For the better part of two centuries, imprisonment has been the primary means of punishment for non-capital offenses in the United States. A person, once convicted, is turned over to an institution that will regulate every minute of her or his life. Yet, despite the central role that prisons have long played in our society, the use of the Constitution to regulate conditions of confinement in prisons is a relatively recent phenomenon. Certainly, part of this has to do with the fact that constitutional litigation did not begin in earnest until the "rediscovery" of the Civil War era civil rights …


Professor Jones And The Constitution, Henry Paul Monaghan Jan 1979

Professor Jones And The Constitution, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Harry Jones's elegant and stimulating Waterman lectures begin on a salutary note. Professor Jones rightly reminds us that, first and foremost, a constitution is not exclusively or primarily a limitation on the exercise of political power, but rather is a charter for its exercise. Accordingly, to view the Constitution as "all brakes and no engine" suggests a serious and fundamental myopia, albeit an understandable one given the popular preoccupation with the Supreme Court's role in vindicating guarantees of civil liberty. But that preoccupation, Professor Jones notes, does more than distort the meaning of the Constitution; it ignores an historically …