Authors: Larry D. Kramer
ISBN-13: 9780195306453, ISBN-10: 0195306457
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: November 2005
Edition: 1st Edition
Larry Kramer is Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean of Stanford Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., of the United States Supreme Court and taught at the law schools of the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and New York University before moving to Stanford. He has written extensively in both academic and popular journals on topics involving the role of courts in society.
In this groundbreaking interpretation of America's founding and of its entire system of judicial review, Larry Kramer reveals that the colonists fought for and created a very different systemand held a very different understanding of citizenshipthan Americans believe to be the norm today. "Popular sovereignty" was not just some historical abstraction, and the notion of "the people" was more than a flip rhetorical device invoked on the campaign trail. Questions of constitutional meaning provoked vigorous public debate and the actions of government officials were greeted with celebratory feasts and bonfires, or riotous resistance. Americans treated the Constitution as part of the lived reality of their daily existence. Their self-sovereignty in law as much as politics was active not abstract.
Introduction : popular constitutionalism | 3 | |
1 | In substance, and in principle, the same as it was heretofore : the customary constitution | 9 |
2 | A rule obligatory upon every department : the origins of judicial review | 35 |
3 | The power under the constitution will always be in the people : the making of the constitution | 73 |
4 | Courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument : accepting judicial review | 93 |
5 | What every true republican ought to depend on : rejecting judicial supremacy | 128 |
6 | Notwithstanding this abstract view : the changing context of constitutional law | 145 |
7 | To preserve the constitution, as a perpetual bond of union : the lessons of experience | 170 |
8 | A layman's document, not a lawyer's contract : the continuing struggle for popular constitutionalism | 207 |
9 | As an American : popular constitutionalism, circa 2004 | 227 |
Epilogue : judicial review without judicial supremacy | 249 |