In Constitutional Orphan, Professor Paula Monopoli explores the significant role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment the woman suffrage amendment ratified in 1920. She sheds new light on the connection between the suffragists as institutional actors in civil society and the emergence of a "thin" conception of the Nineteenth Amendment as a mere nondiscrimination in voting rule, rather than a robust equality norm. In this compelling legal history, Monopoli illuminates how the Nineteenth had implications for federalism, women's citizenship and the definition of equality, as well as how gender, race and class intersect to affect our constitutional development. Monopoli explores the choice by both the National Woman's Party and the National American Woman Suffrage Association to turn away from African American suffragists who were denied the vote even after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Using original sources, legislative history and case analysis, she develops a persuasive theory connecting that moral and strategic failure to the emergence of a narrow interpretation of the amendment. Monopoli also evaluates the impact of class divisions among former suffragist allies. These divisions around support for the NWP's Equal Rights Amendment, found social feminists opposing that "blanket" amendment for fear of its impact on the constitutional validity of protective labor legislation for working-class women. Monopoli details how many state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a broad equality norm. She concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship that suggests ways in which such a robust understanding of the Nineteenth Amendment could be used today to expand gender equality. In this compelling legal history, Monopoli illuminates how gender, race and class intersect to affect our constitutional development.

Figuring Out the Tax recounts the forgotten early development of the federal income tax in the US, resulting from the interplay between Congress and the Treasury Department in the decades following the enactment of the tax in 1913. It covers a wide range of topics including the income tax treatments of marriage, capital losses, charitable contributions and homeownership, as well as the rise, demise and resurrection of income tax withholding. Lawrence Zelenak deftly illustrates how the income tax achieved its current form through a range of stories which are new to tax history scholarship and involve some remarkable personalities and surprising plot twists. Although of particular interest to tax academics and professionals, this book will also serve as a useful introduction to the development of income tax for undergraduate students and law students.

Xiaoping Cong examines the social and cultural significance of Chinese revolutionary legal practice in the construction of marriage and gender relations. Her book is an empirically rich investigation of the ways in which a 1943 legal dispute over an arranged marriage in a Chinese village became a legal, political and cultural exemplar on the national stage. This conceptually groundbreaking study revisits the Chinese Revolution and its impact on women and society by presenting a Chinese experience that cannot and should not be theorized in the framework of Western discourse. Taking a cultural-historical perspective, Cong shows how the Chinese Revolution and its legal practices produced new discourses, neologisms and cultural symbols that contained China's experience in twentieth-century social movements, and how revolutionary practice was sublimated into the concept of 'self-determination', an idea that bridged local experiences with the tendency of the twentieth-century world, and that is a revolutionary legacy for China today.

Now, more than ever, we need to avoid nostalgia in thinking about the Good War. This collection of essays reveals some of the challenges that Americans' commitment to the rule of law faced during the Second World War. As a total war, World War II required an unprecedented mobilization of society and growth of the federal government. The American state survived as a government of laws, not men, but in a very different form than its prewar counterpart. Using examples from the war era, this study demonstrates that major wars can imperil and transform one of our most deeply held values, the notion that public officials are constructed by law.

As a result of total war, the political landscape changed, and, with it, Americans' notions of what law could do. Supreme Court justices endangered their reputation as being above politics through their behind-the-scenes relations with FDR, and in several important constitutional decisions they relinquished the judicial supremacy that many Americans had considered a crucial safeguard of freedom. The national government's power to tax was dramatically expanded in ways that left tax resistors looking like cranks rather than freedom fighters. When New Dealers tried to realize the potential of law as a vehicle of social organization, they fell prey to conservative rivals in the federal bureaucracy and Congress, but this defeat did nothing to slow the overall expansion of the administrative state, which continued under the formal oversight of the federal judiciary.

Latin American Constitutions provides a comprehensive historical study of constitutionalism in Latin America from the independence period to the present, focusing on the Constitution of Cadiz, a foundational document in Latin American constitutionalism. Although drafted in Spain, it was applied in many regions of Latin America, and deputies from America formed a significant part of the drafting body. The politicization of constitutionalism reflected in Latin America's first moments proved to be a lasting legacy evident in the legal and constitutional world of the region today: many of Latin America's present challenges to establishing effective constitutionalism can be traced to the debates, ideas, structures, and assumptions of this text. This book explores the region's attempts to create effective constitutional texts and regimes in light of an established practice of linking constitutions to political goals and places important constitutional thinkers and regional constitutions, such as the Mexican Constitution of 1917, into their legal and historical context.