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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Originalism From The Soft Southern Strategy To The New Right: The Constitutional Politics Of Sam Ervin Jr, Logan E. Sawyer Iii
Originalism From The Soft Southern Strategy To The New Right: The Constitutional Politics Of Sam Ervin Jr, Logan E. Sawyer Iii
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Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other …
A Tale Of Prosecutorial Indiscretion: Ramsey Clark And The Selective Non-Prosecution Of Stokely Carmichael, Lonnie T. Brown
A Tale Of Prosecutorial Indiscretion: Ramsey Clark And The Selective Non-Prosecution Of Stokely Carmichael, Lonnie T. Brown
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During the height of the Vietnam War and one of the most volatile periods of the civil rights movement, then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark controversially resisted intense political pressure to prosecute Black Power originator and antiwar activist Stokely Carmichael. Taken in isolation, this decision may seem courageous and praiseworthy, but when considered against the backdrop of Clark’s contemporaneous prosecution of an all-white group of similarly situated anti-draft leaders (the so-called Boston Five), his exercise of prosecutorial discretion becomes suspect. Specifically, the Boston Five were prosecuted in 1968 for conspiracy to aid and abet draft evasion, a charge for which the evidence …