This book explains the adoption of the US Constitution in terms of what the proponents were trying to accomplish.

No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.

Chronicles one of the first--and most famous--cases to define the reach and power of the federal government over the states. It addressed two questions: Did Congress have the authority to establish a national bank? And was the Maryland law used to tax that bank interfering with the federal government's constitutional authority? In one of Chief Justice John Marshall's most famous opinions, the Court unanimously answered yes to both questions.

This is a collection of interviews of twenty-one actors from Shakespeare theaters and festivals across North America, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. The interviews celebrate the variety in education, training, and approaches to acting conducted by recognized performance scholars. Thus, this book combines scholarly expertise with actors' insights to produce unique views on contemporary Shakespearean performances in the United States and Canada, and fills an important niche in performance criticism. Michael W. Shurgot is Professor of Humanities at South Puget Sound Community College.

This is a global anthology of great texts in the history of political dissent. Volume 1 spans the ancient and early-modern world, beginning with the Book of Isaiah, from the eighth century, BCE, and ending with John C. Calhoun’s “South Carolina Exposition,” from the early nineteenth century CE. Volume 2 begins with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the “Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments,” from the mid-nineteenth century, and ends with the 2008 online Chinese human rights manifesto “Charter 08”. The selected texts come from across the ideological spectrum, representing a wide range of political, cultural, philosophical, and religious perspectives. Each text has been framed with an introduction that describes its historical context and importance and provides readers with assistance in interpreting the text—including explanations of unfamiliar terms and concepts. These introductions have been written for a general audience. Each text is also accompanied by a list of “Suggestions for Further Reading,” which points interested readers toward reliable sources for further exploration of the text, its author, and/or the historical moment or issues involved. This anthology should be accessible and useful to anyone from advanced high school students to scholarly specialists.

The fundamental fact about our Constitution is that it is old -- the oldest written constitution in the world. The fundamental challenge for interpreters of the Constitution is how to read that old document over time. In Fidelity & Constraint, legal scholar Lawrence Lessig explains that one of the most basic approaches to interpreting the constitution is the process of translation. Indeed, some of the most significant shifts in constitutional doctrine are products of the evolution of the translation process over time. In every new era, judges understand their translations as instances of "interpretive fidelity," framed within each new temporal context. Yet, as Lessig also argues, there is a repeatedly occurring countermove that upends the process of translation. Throughout American history, there has been a second fidelity in addition to interpretive fidelity: what Lessig calls "fidelity to role." In each of the cycles of translation that he describes, the role of the judge -- the ultimate translator -- has evolved too. Old ways of interpreting the text now become illegitimate because they do not match up with the judge's perceived role. And when that conflict occurs, the practice of judges within our tradition has been to follow the guidance of a fidelity to role. Ultimately, Lessig not only shows us how important the concept of translation is to constitutional interpretation, but also exposes the institutional limits on this practice. The first work of both constitutional and foundational theory by one of America's leading legal minds, Fidelity & Constraint maps strategies that both help judges understand the fundamental conflict at the heart of interpretation whenever it arises and work around the limits it inevitably creates.

Americans err in thinking that while their politics may be ailing, their Constitution is fine. Sick politics is a sure sign of constitutional failure. This is Sotirios Barber’s message in Constitutional Failure. Public attitudes fostered by a consumer culture, constitution worship, the lack of a trusted leadership community, and academic historicism and value skepticism—these, this book tells us in clear and bracing terms, are at the root of our political dysfunction. Barber characterizes the Constitution as a plan of government—a set of means to public purposes like national security and prosperity. He argues that if the government is failing, it’s fair to conclude that the plan is failing and that laws that are supposed to serve as means can’t in reason continue to bind when they no longer work. He argues further that constitutional success depends ultimately on a stratum of diverse and self-critical citizens, who see each other as moral equals and parts of one national community. These citizens, with the politicians among them, would be good-faith contestants regarding the meaning of the common good and the most effective means to secure it. In this way—showing how the success of a constitutional democracy is more a matter of political attitudes than of institutional performance—Barber’s book upends the conventional understanding of constitutional failure. In Barber’s analysis, the apparent stability of formal constitutional institutions—usually interpreted as evidence of constitutional health—may actually indicate the defining element of constitutional failure: a mentally inert citizenry no longer capable of constitutional reflection and reform. At once concise and thorough in its analysis of the concept of constitutional failure and its accounts of a “healthy politics,” the corrosive impact of Madisonian checks and balances (as a substitute for trustworthy leadership), and the outlook for meaningful reform, this book offers a carefully reasoned and provocative assessment of the viability of constitutional governance in the United States.