Search results for ""author akhil amar""

"I don't think there is anyone in the academy these days capable of more patient and attentive reading of the constitutional text than Akhil Amar."--Jeremy Waldron, New York Review of BooksIn The Constitution Today, Akhil Reed Amar, America's preeminent constitutional scholar, considers the biggest and most bitterly contested debates of the last two decades and provides a passionate handbook for thinking constitutionally about today's headlines. Amar shows how the Constitution's text, history, and structure are crucial repositories of collective wisdom, providing specific rules and grand themes relevant to every organ of the American body politic.Prioritizing sound constitutional reasoning over partisan preferences, Amar makes the case for diversity-based affirmative action and a right to have a gun in one's home for self-defense, and the case against spending caps on independent political advertising and bans on same-sex marriage. He explains what's wrong with presidential dynasties, advocates a "nuclear option" to restore majority rule in the Senate, and suggests ways to reform the Supreme Court. And he revisits three dramatic constitutional conflicts--the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the contested election of George W. Bush, and the fight over Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act.Leading readers through the questions at stake in each episode while outlining his abiding views regarding the Constitution's letter, its spirit, and the direction constitutional law must go, Amar offers an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand America's Constitution and its relevance today.

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When the US Constitution won widespread popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of decades of passionate argument about legal and political first principles-a furious debate over the nature of government and the rights and duties of citizens that boiled over into Revolution. But ratification hardly ended America's constitutional conversation. For the next fifty years, both ordinary Americans and statesmen like George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson continued to wrestle with weighty constitutional questions, from the halls of government to the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be pushed beyond its original footprint? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? Where did Indian tribes fit into the picture? Women? Free blacks? What rule should the Constitution's then-weakest branch, led for more than thirty years by Chief Justice John Marshall, play in these resolving such questions? In The Words That Made Us, celebrated Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of America's constitutional conversation during its first eighty years-from its birth in 1760 through the 1830s, when the last of America's early leaders died and bequeathed this boisterous and sophisticated conversation to posterity. Amar traces the threads of Constitutional discourse, uniting history and law in a vivid and sweeping narrative that seeks both to reveal this history anew and to make clear who was right and who was wrong on the biggest legal issues confronting early America. Without proper popular understanding of the Constitution, America and the world suffer. In The Words That Made Us, Amar offers an essential history of the Constitution's formative decades and an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand America's Constitution and its relevance today.

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