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A Community Built on Words - The Constitution in History and Politics (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,117
Discovery Miles 11 170
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A Community Built on Words - The Constitution in History and Politics (Paperback)
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H. Jefferson Powell offers a powerful new approach to one of the
central issues in American constitutional thinking today: the
problem of constitutional law's historicity, or the many ways in
which constitutional arguments and outcomes are shaped both by
historical circumstances and by the political goals and commitments
of various actors, including judges. The presence of such
influences is often considered highly problematic: if
constitutional law is political and historical through and through,
then what differentiates it from politics per se, and what gives it
integrity and coherence? Powell argues that constitutional theory
has as its (sometimes hidden) agenda the ambition of showing how
constitutional law can escape from history and politics, while much
constitutional history seeks to identify an historically true
meaning of the constitutional text that, once uncovered, can serve
as a corrective to subsequent deviations from that truth.
Combining history and theory, Powell analyzes a series of
constitutional controversies from 1790 to 1944 to demonstrate that
constitutional law from its very beginning has involved politically
charged and ideologically divisive arguments. Nowhere in our past
can one find the golden age of apolitical constitutional thinking
that a great deal of contemporary scholarship seeks or presupposes.
Viewed over time, American constitutional law is a history of
political dispute couched in constitutional terms.
Powell then takes his conclusions one step further, claiming that
it is precisely this historical tradition of argument that has
given American constitutional law a remarkable coherence and
integrity over time. No matter what the particularpolitical
disputes of the day might be, constitutional argument has provided
a shared language through which our political community has been
able to fight out its battles without ultimately fracturing.
"A Community Built on Words" will be must reading for any student
of constitutional history, theory, or law.
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