Legal History Commons^™

The Little Rock Crisis And Foreign Affairs: Race, Resistance, And The Image Of American Democracy, Mary L. Dudziak

Mary L. Dudziak

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce a school desegregation order at Central High School in the fall of 1957, more than racial equality was at issue. The image of American democracy was at stake. The Little Rock crisis played out on a world stage, as news media around the world covered the crisis. During the weeks of impasse leading up to Eisenhower's dramatic intervention, foreign critics questioned how the United States could argue that its democratic system of government was a model for others to follow when racial segregation was tolerated in …

Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, And Justice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS.

The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into …

The Unitary Executive During The First Half-Century, Steven G. Calabresi, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent Supreme Court decisions and the impeachment of President Clinton has reinvigorated the debate over Congress’s authority to employ devices such as special counsels and independent agencies to restrict the President’s control over the administration of the law. The initial debate focused on whether the Constitution rejected the “executive by committee” employed by the Articles of the Confederation in favor of a “unitary executive,” in which all administrative authority is centralized in the President. More recently, the debate has begun to turn towards historical practices. Some scholars have suggested that independent agencies and special counsels have become such established features …