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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Identity Contests: Litigation And The Meaning Of Social-Movement Causes, Mary Ziegler
Identity Contests: Litigation And The Meaning Of Social-Movement Causes, Mary Ziegler
Scholarly Publications
What do we mean by a right to life? Should—or does—such a right cover only antiabortion claims? Or should the term apply more broadly—to debates about class and welfare, about the death penalty, or even about human rights? In the abortion wars, litigation strategy has helped to dictate the answers to these questions. Historians and legal scholars have studied the tensions between lawyers and the lay actors they represent, chronicling how lawyers modify and even limit the social changes activists demand. By putting the attorney-client relationship center stage, scholars have sometimes obscured an equally important story about how litigation strategy—as …
Grassroots Originalism: Rethinking The Politics Of Judicial Philosophy, Mary Ziegler
Grassroots Originalism: Rethinking The Politics Of Judicial Philosophy, Mary Ziegler
Scholarly Publications
How has originalism become so politically successful? In answering this question, leading scholarship has focused on the ways in which political leaders, judges, and lawyers have cultivated popular support for originalism. In one account, legal academics, politicians, and judges have explained the legal merits of originalism as a method of interpretation: its political neutrality and its democratic legitimacy. In a second version, political leaders—in particular, the Reagan Administration and the judges it nominated—made apparent that originalism would often produce outcomes that social conservatives found satisfactory. With some exceptions, leading studies primarily address the contributions made by elites to rhetoric about …