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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Inequality Of America's Death Penalty: A Crossroads For Capital Punishment At The Intersection Of The Eighth And Fourteenth Amendments, John Bessler
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We live in a divided society, from gated communities to cell blocks congested with disproportionate numbers of young African-American men. There are rich and poor, privileged and homeless, Democrats and Republicans, wealthy zip codes and stubbornly impoverished ones. There are committed "Black Lives Matter" protesters, and there are those who—invoking "Blue Lives Matter" demonstrate in support of America‘s hardworking police officers. In her new article, "Matters of Strata: Race, Gender, and Class Structures in Capital Cases," George Washington University law professor Phyllis Goldfarb highlights the stratification of our society and offers a compelling critique of America‘s death penalty regime—one, she …
Unfinished Business: Protecting Voting Rights In The Twenty-First Century, Gilda R. Daniels
Unfinished Business: Protecting Voting Rights In The Twenty-First Century, Gilda R. Daniels
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While minorities have experienced great progress because of the Voting Rights Act, particularly section 5 of the Act, the work to achieve an electoral process free of discrimination remains unfinished. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down section 4 of the Act, which provided the coverage formula through which section 5 was implemented. Without section 4, there is no section 5. The historical and contemporaneous discrimination that minorities in states formerly covered under section 5 continue to face is substantial and outpaces that in noncovered states. Scholars cannot divorce the debate surrounding section 5’s constitutionality, which continues …
The Colonel's Finest Campaign: Robert R. Mccormick And Near V. Minnesota, Eric Easton
The Colonel's Finest Campaign: Robert R. Mccormick And Near V. Minnesota, Eric Easton
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Today, media corporations and their professional and trade associations, along with organizations like Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the American Civil Liberties Union, carefully monitor litigation that implicates First Amendment values and decide whether, when, and how to intervene. It was not always so. Litigation by an institutional press to avoid or create doctrinal precedent under the First Amendment really began with the appointment of Col. Robert R. McCormick to head the ANPA's Committee on Freedom of the Press in the spring of 1928 and his involvement in Near v. Minnesota beginning that fall. Because of McCormick's …
Lecture: Second Founding: The Story Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
Lecture: Second Founding: The Story Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
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The story of the Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment is a lost story of American history, covered over by Southern inspiring myth making and an unwillingness to grapple with the central role of slavery in American history. Americans can take new inspiration from that story and use it as an example of how our popular democracy can be perfected. Even today, nearly a century and a half after the Second Founders did their work, their words and example move before us as a people, a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.
The Undiscovered Country: Northern Views Of The Defeated South And The Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
The Undiscovered Country: Northern Views Of The Defeated South And The Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
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In 1866, Harper's Weekly announced a new series of woodcuts of Southern life with the remark, "[t]o us the late Slave States seem almost like a newly discovered country." It is difficult for Americans in the Twenty-First Century, in a culture of cable news coverage and national newspapers, to appreciate just how mysterious the former Confederacy seemed to Northerners in the months after Appomattox. It was not simply that four years of war had made communication between the two halves of the nation difficult - though that was true, and both Northern and Southern society had changed during the searing …
The Antebellum Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
The Antebellum Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
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Understanding the Fourteenth Amendment is the key question of Constitutional law, both as it pertains to individual rights and, in many areas, as it relates to questions of Congressional power as opposed to the reserved powers of the states. The Amendment is often disaggregated and read clause by clause - but the intellectual and political background of its framers suggests that the Amendment in fact forms a coherent whole and that reading it as a whole might be a fertile source of new meanings. The Amendment was written by politicians who had spent their careers deeply involved in anti-slavery politics. …