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Full-Text Articles in Law
Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski
Reflections On From Slaves To Citizens Bondage, Freedom And The Constitution: The New Slavery Scholarship And Its Impact On Law And Legal Historiography, Robert J. Kaczorowski
Faculty Scholarship
The thesis of Professor Donald Nieman's paper, "From Slaves to Citizens: African-Americans, Rights Consciousness, and Reconstruction," is that the nation experienced a revolution in the United States Constitution and in the consciousness of African Americans. According to Professor Nieman, the Reconstruction Amendments represented "a dramatic departure from antebellum constitutional principles,"' because the Thirteenth Amendment reversed the pre-Civil War constitutional guarantee of slavery and "abolish[ed] slavery by federal authority." The Fourteenth Amendment rejected the Supreme Court's "racially-based definition of citizenship [in Dred Scott v. Sandford4], clearly establishing a color-blind citizenship” and the Fifteenth Amendment "wrote the principle of equality into the …
Capital Punishment: The Humanistic And Moral Issues Address., Helen Prejean
Capital Punishment: The Humanistic And Moral Issues Address., Helen Prejean
St. Mary's Law Journal
Death row reminds us that justice is not equal. Death sentences, opposed to being reserved for only the most heinous crimes, are generally related to the profile of the victim and identity of those most outraged by the crime. The majority of people on death row killed a white person, even though one-half of homicide victims in the United States are people of color. Because of this, and the fact that the law almost always sides with people of wealth and power, the death penalty works to compound societal trauma instead of healing or solving anything. The skewed and harmful …
The Natural Law Tradition On The Modern Supreme Court: Not Burke, But The Enlightenment Tradition Represented By Locke, Madison, And Marshall., R. Randall Kelso
The Natural Law Tradition On The Modern Supreme Court: Not Burke, But The Enlightenment Tradition Represented By Locke, Madison, And Marshall., R. Randall Kelso
St. Mary's Law Journal
A traditional common-law style of judicial decisionmaking exists which was present at this nation’s founding. This common law style is derived from natural law tradition. And this tradition stands as an alternative to the formalism of Justice Scalia or the Holmesian style of Chief Justice Rehnquist. This natural law style, with its focus on the religious and communitarian ethical tradition, was the dominant view of judicial interpretation for the framing and ratifying generation of the original Constitution and the Civil War Amendments. The decisionmaking style of Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter appears to have great affinity with this traditional common-law …