Constitutional Commentary articles from December 2004

Constitutional Commentary archives from December 2004

The law student's bill of rights.
December 22, 2004... Recent demolition at Vanderbilt Law School to make way for an espresso bar in the library has resulted in the discovery of an important and hitherto unknown historical document. Its contents are reproduced below, along with scholarly...

The political battle for the Constitution.
December 22, 2004... I. INTRODUCTION Battles over the meaning of the Constitution began before the document was written, and they have continued through history at varying levels of intensity and salience. But an important change regarding constitutional...

Reynolds v. United States: the historical construction of constitutional reality.
December 22, 2004... In the Supreme Court's first case interpreting the Constitution's free exercise clause, Chief Justice Morrison Waite endowed the next two centuries of religion clause jurisprudence with a generous legacy of constitutional history. In that 1879...

Tahoe's requiem: the death of the Scalian view of property and justice.
December 22, 2004... I. INTRODUCTION In the two latest "takings" cases decided by the United States Supreme Court, (1) the string of recent victories by landowners against government seems to have come to an abrupt halt. Although Palazzolo v. Rhode Island (2)...

Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism.(Book review)
December 22, 2004... PERILOUS TIMES: FREE SPEECH IN WARTIME FROM THE SEDITION ACT OF 1798 TO THE WAR ON TERRORISM. By Geoffrey R. Stone (1) New York. W.W. Norton and Company. 2004. Pp. 730 + xx. $ 35.00. OVERVIEW Geoffrey R. Stone has written a long and...

Public Law.(Book review)
December 22, 2004... PUBLIC LAW. By Adam Tomkins. (1) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. xx, 231. $24.95. American constitutional lawyers have always been curious about British public law. Blackstone, of course, was the most widely-read legal work in the early...

The Ultimate Rule of Law.(Book review)
December 22, 2004... THE ULTIMATE RULE OF LAW. By David M. Beatty. (1) New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. 193 + xvii. $80.00 "Proportionality" analysis is becoming a term of art in constitutional law. If you have not heard of it, that is because the...

For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief.(Book review)
December 22, 2004... FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT: PRACTICAL REASONING, CHARACTER, AND THE ETHICS OF BELIEF. By Eugene Garver. (1) Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 2004. 264 pp. $22.50. Rhetoric gets a bad press in legal analysis. (3) To call a passage in an...