The successful creation of the Constitution is a suspense story. "The Summer of 1787" takes us into the sweltering room in which delegates struggled for four months to produce the flawed but enduring document that would define the nation -- then and now.

George Washington presided, James Madison kept the notes, Benjamin Franklin offered wisdom and humor at crucial times. "The Summer of 1787" traces the struggles within the Philadelphia Convention as the delegates hammered out the charter for the world's first constitutional democracy. Relying on the words of the delegates themselves to explore the Convention's sharp conflicts and hard bargaining, David O. Stewart lays out the passions and contradictions of the often painful process of writing the Constitution.

It was a desperate balancing act. Revolutionary principles required that the people have power, but could the people be trusted? Would a stronger central government leave room for the states? Would the small states accept a Congress in which seats were alloted according to population rather than to each sovereign state? And what of slavery? The supercharged debates over America's original sin led to the most creative and most disappointing political deals of the Convention.

The room was crowded with colorful and passionate characters, some known -- Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Edmund Randolph -- and others largely forgotten. At different points during that sultry summer, more than half of the delegates threatened to walk out, and some actually did, but Washington's quiet leadership and the delegates' inspired compromises held the Convention together.

In a country continually arguing over the document's original intent, it is fascinating to watch these powerful characters struggle toward consensus -- often reluctantly -- to write a flawed but living and breathing document that could evolve with the nation.

James Madison presented his most celebrated and studied political ideas in his contributions to The Federalist, the essays that he, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote in 1787-1788 to secure ratification of the U.S. Constitution. As Jack N. Rakove shows in A Politician Thinking, however, those essays do not illustrate the full complexity and vigor of Madison's thinking. In this book, Rakove pushes beyond what Madison thought to examine how he thought, showing that this founder's political genius lay less in the content of his published writings than in the ways he turned his creative mind to solving real political problems. Rakove begins his analysis by examining how Madison drew upon his experiences as a member of the Continental Congress and as a Virginia legislator to develop his key ideas. Madison sought to derive lessons of history from his reading and his own experience, but he also thought about politics in terms of what we now recognize as game theory. After discussing Madison's approach to the challenge of constitutional change, Rakove emphasizes his strikingly modern understanding of legislative deliberation, which he treated as the defining problem of republican government. Rakove also addresses Madison's deliberation about ways to protect the rights of individuals and political minorities from the rule of ""factious majorities."" The book closes by tracing how Madison developed strategies for maintaining long-term constitutional stability and adjusting to the new realities of governance under the Constitution. Engaging and accessible, A Politician Thinking offers new insight concerning a key constitutional thinker and the foundations of the American constitutional system. Having a more thorough understanding of how Madison solved the problems presented in the formation of that system, we better grasp a unique moment of political innovation.

Rome's once independent Italian allies became communities of a new Roman territorial state after the Social War of 91-87 BC. Edward Bispham examines how the transition from independence to subordination was managed, and how, between the opposing tensions of local particularism, competing traditions and identities, aspirations for integration, cultural change, and indifference from Roman central authorities, something new and dynamic appeared in the jaded world of the late Republic. Bispham charts the successes and failures of the attempts to make a new political community (Roman Italy), and new Roman citizens scattered across the peninsula - a dramatic and important story in that, while Italy was being built, Rome was falling apart; and while the Roman Republic fell, the Italian municipal system endured, and made possible the government, and even the survival, of the Roman empire in the West.

In this edited volume, an array of scholars has examined recent policymaking efforts in selected areas of contemporary importance. Government at Work: Policymaking in the Twenty-First Century Congress provides chapter-length treatment to reveal the similarities and fundamentals of policy development while also illustrating the unique issues and obstacles found in each policy environment. This book's scope spans the entire policymaking process, exposing the readers to the interaction among all major power centers, ranging from interest groups, media, courts, Congress, the president, and the federal bureaucracy. It shows the dynamic nature of American policymaking system. The approach employed in this book treats events, such as Congress passing a law or the Supreme Court announcing a ruling, as important steps in the policy process rather than as merely ends unto themselves. This volume focuses on major legislation passed by Congress since the turn of the century. It features one case study per chapter, demonstrating how issues rise to the national agenda, pass through the congressional labyrinth to become public policies, are implemented by the federal bureaucracy, receive feedback from affected elements of the society, and ultimately evolve over the years.

Globalisation, Law and the State begins - as is customary in globalisation literature - with an acknowledgement of the definitional difficulties associated with globalisation. Rather than labour the point, the book identifies some economic, political and cultural dimensions to the phenomenon and uses these to analyse existing and emerging challenges to State-centric and territorial models of law and governance. It surveys three areas that are typically associated with globalisation - financial markets, the internet, and public contracts - as well as trade more generally, the environment, human rights, and national governance. On this basis it considers how global legal norms are formed, how they enmesh with the norms of other legal orders, and how they create pressure for legal harmonisation. This, in turn, leads to an analysis of the corresponding challenges that globalisation presents to traditional notions of sovereignty and the models of public law that have grown from them. While some of the themes addressed here will be familiar to students of the European process (there are prominent references to the European experience throughout the book), Globalisation, Law and the State provides a clear insight into how the sovereign space of States and their legal orders are diminishing and being replaced by an altogether more fluid system of intersecting orders and norms. This is followed by an analysis of the theory and practice of the globalisation of law, and a suggestion that the workings of law in the global era can best be conceived of in terms of networks that link together a range of actors that exist above, below and within the State, as well as on either side of the public-private divide. This book is an immensely valuable, innovative and concise study of globalisation and its effect on law and the state.

When the Founders penned the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, it was not difficult to identify the "persons, houses, papers, and effects" they meant to protect; nor was it hard to understand what "unreasonable searches and seizures" were. The Fourth Amendment was intended to stop the use of general warrants and writs of assistance and applied primarily to protect the home. Flash forward to a time of digital devices, automobiles, the war on drugs, and a Supreme Court dominated by several decades of the jurisprudence of crime control, and the legal meaning of everything from "effects" to "seizures" has dramatically changed. Michael C. Gizzi and R. Craig Curtis make sense of these changes in The Fourth Amendment in Flux. The book traces the development and application of search and seizure law and MYUjurisprudence over time, with particular emphasis on decisions of the Roberts Court. Cell phones, GPS tracking devices, drones, wiretaps, the Patriot Act, constantly changing technology, and a political culture that emphasizes crime control create new challenges for Fourth Amendment interpretation and jurisprudence. This work exposes the tensions caused by attempts to apply pretechnological legal doctrine to modern problems of digital privacy. In their analysis of the Roberts Court's relevant decisions, Gizzi and Curtis document the different approaches to the law that have been applied by the justices since the Obama nominees took their seats on the court. Their account, combining law, political science, and history, provides insight into the court's small group dynamics, and traces changes regarding search and seizure law in the opinions of one of its longest serving members, Justice Antonin Scalia. At a time when issues of privacy are increasingly complicated by technological advances, this overview and analysis of Fourth Amendment law is especially welcome-an invaluable resource as weaddress the enduring question of how to balance freedom against security in the context of the challenges of the twenty-firstcentury.

Understanding the intricacies of today s political issues can be a challenging task. It is difficult to know which information to believe and which to discard. In F.R.E.E.D.O.M., author James Liberty presents a collection of essay s that delve into the aspects of the seven most important political issues facing Americans today. Liberty explores these topics and provides the information needed to make educated decisions to maintain your freedom. F.R.E.E.D.O.M. addresses seven vital areas in which your freedoms are being stripped from you every day: Fighting terrorists Reforming healthcare Economy Energy Discovering the truth about climate change Obtaining better education for our children Misleading media In addition, F.R.E.E.D.O.M. spells out the key differences between liberals and conservatives. It helps you understand the ins and outs of the political issues so you can chose a side based on reasoning and facts rather than on talking points and misinformation.

Radicalism had a powerful but largely unacknowledged influence in the Italian-American community. This study brings together 16 selections that restore to Italian-American history the radical experience that has long remained suppressed, but that nevertheless helped shape both the Italian-American community and the American left. The detailed introduction by the volume editors interprets the overall history of Italian-American radicalism and offers extensive bibliographical references on the topic, which the volume editors organize into three sections: labor, politics, and culture. A concluding selection relates the radicalism of Italian Americans to that in other Italian immigrant communities. In the section on labor, Rudolph Vecoli, among others, traces the rise and decline of radicalism within the Italian-American working class, and Jennifer Guglielmo breaks new ground in uncovering the involvement of Italian American women in the radical movements. In politics, Paul Avrich unveils the violent reaction of anarchists in the United States to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and Jackie DiSalvo identifies Father James Groppi as the most important white leader in the Civil Rights movement. On culture, Julia Lisella, Mary Jo Bono, and Edvige Guinta present pioneering interpretive studies on the work of Italian-American women in literature.

There have been volumes upon volumes written about the US Constitution, but many of them just confuse things.

William James, a longtime student of the US Constitution, relies on James Madison, its recognized father, as well as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to reveal the document's true meaning in this detailed analysis.

James reveals what the Founding Fathers really intended the Constitution to do, and he also shares forgotten truths, such as:

"Natural born" means that a child is born from parents who are both citizens of the United States.

The Second Amendment simply recognizes two unalienable rights; one is the right of free states to organize a militia, and the other is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is believed by many to have prolonged and exacerbated the Great Depression. More importantly, the New Deal was unconstitutional.

James also explores how politicians consistently come up short in applying constitutional principles and how lawyers deliberately confuse people about the Constitution's meaning.

Stop accepting what politicians say at face value, and empower yourself with the knowledge you need to stand up for your rights with "The Constitution and What It Means."

"Well-researched and straightforward"
--"International Affairs, Oct. 2001"

"This is a well-documented and perceptive analysis of the workings of the Syrian regime and of the problems confronting the country...well worth reading"
--"International Journal, Autumn 2001"

For more than thirty years Hafez al-Asad has ruled Syria with an iron fist. Six U.S. presidents and eight Israeli prime ministers have come and gone, but Asad remains, one of the last of the old generation of Arab leaders. But in the post-Cold War Middle East Asad and his country are faced with an array of bewildering choices. Will they allow greater civil liberties and economic liberalization, or assert strong, centralized one-party control of the state? Will they make peace with Israel, and at what price? Will they cement their growing relationship with the United States or return to the hostilities of the past?

Eyal Zisser tackles these questions and gets inside the mind of the man President Clinton called "the smartest leader in the Middle East." He also examines the peculiar dynamics of the Asad family with its Byzantine power plays and competing factions. He tells the fascinating story of how Asad struggles to appease his relatives and his clan while his son waits in the wings to assume power and his brother plots from abroad to gain control of the nation he regards as rightfully his.

Asad's Legacy is the most up-to-date, thorough treatment of Asad's role in the history and politics of the contemporary Middle East. Zisser sheds new light on the story of Asad's rule over his nation and points the way to the future of Syria and the entire region.

This book examines the history of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, and its interpretation by the Supreme Court. It concentrates on the changes in interpretation that have taken place after the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1961, decided in Mapp v. Ohio to apply the exclusionary rule, which makes illegally seized evidence inadmissible in court, to the actions of state governments. In The Evolution of the Fourth Amendment, Thomas N. McInnis demonstrates that prior to Mapp the Court relied on the warrant rule, which with limited exceptions emphasized the need to have a search warrant prior to a search or seizure. Due to the unhappiness that post-Warren Courts had with the application of the exclusionary rule, they reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment using the expansive language that the Warren Court had used in Fourth Amendment cases. In doing so, they broadened the government's powers to search and seize under the Fourth Amendment by developing new exceptions to the warrant rule, developing both the reasonableness approach and special needs test to the Fourth Amendment, limiting the expectations of privacy that citizens have, and narrowing those areas actually protected by the amendment. McInnis also examines how the Court has limited the effect of the exclusionary rule by reinterpreting when it needs to be applied and by creating new exceptions. The book ends by examining the emerging Fourth Amendment jurisprudence of the Roberts Court and assessing the future of the Fourth Amendment in a post-9/11 world.

The application of the Political Question Doctrine is at a crucial crossroads as the Supreme Court continues to test new "War on Terrorism" initiatives. Historically, the political question doctrine has held the courts from resolving constitutional issues that are better left to other departments of government, as a way of maintaining the system of checks and balances. However, the doctrine's many ambiguities have allowed a roughly defined juxtaposition of the branches of government during previous years when the Republic was concerned with both international matters and those within its continental confines. The Political Question Doctrine and the Supreme Court of the United States discusses the gradual changes in the parameters of the doctrine, including its current position dealing with increasingly extraterritorial concerns. Nada Mourtada-Sabbah and Bruce E. Cain bring together critical essays that examine the broad issues of judicial involvement in politics and the future of the doctrine. With a wide range of historical and theoretical perspectives, this book will stimulate debate among those interested in political science and legal studies.

In quantity and importance, private standards are rapidly taking over the role of public norms in the international and national regulation of product safety. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the rise, role and status of these private product safety standards in the legal regulation of integrating markets. In international and regional trade law as in European and American constitutional and administrative law, tort law and antitrust law, the book analyses the ways in which legal systems can and do recognise private norms as 'law.' This sociological question of law's recognition of private governance is indissolubly connected with a normative question of democratic theory: can law recognize legal validity and democratic legitimacy outside the constitution, without constitutional political institutions and beyond the nation state? Or: can law 'constitute' private transnational governance? The book offers the first systematic treatment of European, American and international 'standards law' in the English language, and makes a significant contribution to the study of the processes of globalization and privatization in social and legal theory. For the thesis on which this book was based Harm Schepel was awarded the first EUI Alumni Prize for the "best interdisciplinary and/or comparative thesis on European issues" written at the EUI in recent years.

Al Gore and the liberal left would have you believe the world is in an energy crisis. They would have you believe that only alternative energies- "green" energies-will save us from this crisis and the world from self-destruction. Gerald Westbrook has a rebuttal. Westbrook spent his career in the energy field, working with a wide variety of energy sources that have proved their efficacy, if only the "Gorons" would quiet down for a second.

"How Green Are the Gorons?: Liberal Propaganda Out of Control" is an in-depth review of our country's energy situation, written by an informed man who has been there and seen that. Westbrook discusses the research behind global warming. Pulling from his extensive experience, he provides comments and examples on key American energy sources. He would argue that it is much too soon to enter into a carbon-free world It's also much too soon to panic.

The Goron propaganda has convinced the country that we are in crisis. The current podium propaganda is so loud that it operates at the level of a nationwide white noise, blocking out analysis and debate. By utilizing our energy sources-including fossil fuels-in a cost-effective way, our energy situation will be manageable.

Stategraphy-the ethnographic exploration of relational modes, boundary work, and forms of embeddedness of actors-offers crucial analytical avenues for researching the state. By exploring interactions and negotiations of local actors in different institutional settings, the contributors explore state transformations in relation to social security in a variety of locations spanning from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans to the United Kingdom and France. Fusing grounded empirical studies with rigorous theorizing, the volume provides new perspectives to broader related debates in social research and political analysis.

Taking an innovative approach to the subject, this book looks at how U.S. presidents and their administrations' policies from the late 1960s to 2017 have led to rampant over-imprisonment and a public policy catastrophe in the United States. Mandatory minimum sentencing; "three-strikes-and-you're-out" legislation; harsher sentences and less parole and probation. The result of draconian criminal justice policies in the last six decades is that the United States is the largest incarcerator in the world, surpassing Russia and China, with significant overrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos in U.S. prisons, especially for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses. Presidents and Mass Incarceration: Choices at the Top, Repercussions at the Bottom shows how American presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to Donald J. Trump have operated as significant political criminal justice entrepreneurs and how the leadership choices made at the top by these chief executives continue to have severe repercussions for the citizens at the lowest levels of our communities. Author Linda K. Mancillas references State of the Union Addresses, presidential initiatives, laws passed by Congress, Supreme Court decisions, and public opinion on high-profile crime events to assemble a cohesive framework of data that supports each president's impact on the incarceration explosion. Readers will come away with a greater appreciation for the complexity and magnitude of the political, economic, and societal issue of over-imprisonment that both the federal and state governments are attempting to address. Explains how presidential "tough-on-crime" rhetoric fueled by the public's fear of crime led to the war on crime, the war on drugs, and the war on gangs, resulting in the nation becoming known as "Prison America" Presents undeniable evidence that U.S. presidents have played a major role in America's imprisonment tragedy Provides a careful analysis of mass incarceration through presidential leadership to document how seemingly well-intentioned choices made at the top have had devastating repercussions on the bottom realm of our society

After the 2016 and 2020 elections, harsh critiques of polling were blasted everywhere: in news headlines, on social media and among colleagues and friends. But this rush to declare polling irrelevant is misguided-and dangerous. In Strength in Numbers, data journalist G. Elliott Morris urges readers to recognise how polling shapes and sustains democracy. He illuminates how public opinion polls provide a voice for citizens and influence such crucial matters as a party's selection of presidential candidates. He guides readers through a vibrant history of polling to provide insider context, explains how polls have been misused and misinterpreted and demonstrates how we have underestimated their potential impact. He also candidly acknowledges where polls have fallen short and charts a path for the industry's future where it can truly work for the people. Persuasively argued and deeply researched, Strength in Numbers implores all those who believe in democracy not to give up on polls, but to fully understand them.