Many hoped or feared that Antonin Scalia's appointment to the Supreme Court in 1986 would guarantee a conservative counter-revolution that would reverse the liberal jurisprudence of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and which was continued to some extent under the Burger Court though the influence of Justice William Brennan. In addition, President Reagan described Scalia's nomination as part of a project to remake the role of the Court, promote an interpretive approach of originalism, and shift authority and discretion to the States. Yet by the time of his death in 2016 it was unclear to what extent Scalia had effected the legal, institutional, or political revolutions that had been anticipated. While the Court did move to the right doctrinally, and reversed or modified many Vinson-Warren-Burger precedents, Scalia's influence on constitutional jurisprudence turned out to be far less than it could have been, and his ability to persuade other Justices to adopt his legal views-both substantively and methodologically-was less than many mainstream media accounts recognize. Scalia's institutional and political legacies are similarly complex: he was neither as transformative a figure as some of his allies might have hoped nor so unimportant as some of his detractors might have wished. The fact that his death and the controversy surrounding his replacement is so intense speaks to the fragile legacy that Scalia really has had on the Supreme Court after 30 years. This book will assess Scalia's legacy in an edited volume that assembles leading legal and political science scholars who will evaluate his impact across a range of jurisprudential, institutional, and political issues.

This book is a comparative study of the American legal development in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on Illinois and Virginia, supported by observations from six additional states, the book traces the crucial formative moment in the development of an American system of common law in northern and southern courts. The process of legal development, and the form the basic analytical categories of American law came to have, are explained as the products of different responses to the challenge of new industrial technologies, particularly railroads. The nature of those responses was dictated by the ideologies that accompanied the social, political, and economic orders of the two regions. American common law, ultimately, is found to express an emerging model of citizenship, appropriate to modern conditions. As a result, the process of legal development provides an illuminating perspective on the character of American political thought in a formative period of the nation.

This book explores two basic questions regarding constitutional theory. First, in view of a commitment to democratic self-rule and widespread disagreement on questions of value, how is the creation of a legitimate constitutional regime possible? Second, what must be true about a constitution if the regime that it supports is to retain its claim to legitimacy? Howard Schweber shows that the answers to these questions appear in a theory of constitutional language that combines democratic theory with constitutional philosophy. The creation of a legitimate constitutional regime depends on a shared commitment to a particular and specialized form of language. Out of this simple observation, Schweber develops arguments about the characteristics of constitutional language, the necessary differences between constitutional language and the language of ordinary law or morality, as well as the authority of officials such as judges to engage in constitutional review of laws.

Many hoped or feared that Antonin Scalia's appointment to the Supreme Court in 1986 would guarantee a conservative counter-revolution that would reverse the liberal jurisprudence of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and which was continued to some extent under the Burger Court though the influence of Justice William Brennan. In addition, President Reagan described Scalia's nomination as part of a project to remake the role of the Court, promote an interpretive approach of originalism, and shift authority and discretion to the States. Yet by the time of his death in 2016 it was unclear to what extent Scalia had effected the legal, institutional, or political revolutions that had been anticipated. While the Court did move to the right doctrinally, and reversed or modified many Vinson-Warren-Burger precedents, Scalia's influence on constitutional jurisprudence turned out to be far less than it could have been, and his ability to persuade other Justices to adopt his legal views-both substantively and methodologically-was less than many mainstream media accounts recognize. Scalia's institutional and political legacies are similarly complex: he was neither as transformative a figure as some of his allies might have hoped nor so unimportant as some of his detractors might have wished. The fact that his death and the controversy surrounding his replacement is so intense speaks to the fragile legacy that Scalia really has had on the Supreme Court after 30 years. This book will assess Scalia's legacy in an edited volume that assembles leading legal and political science scholars who will evaluate his impact across a range of jurisprudential, institutional, and political issues.

This book is a comparative study of the American legal development in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on Illinois and Virginia, supported by observations from six additional states, the book traces the crucial formative moment in the development of an American system of common law in northern and southern courts. The process of legal development, and the form the basic analytical categories of American law came to have, are explained as the products of different responses to the challenge of new industrial technologies, particularly railroads. The nature of those responses was dictated by the ideologies that accompanied the social, political, and economic orders of the two regions. American common law, ultimately, is found to express an emerging model of citizenship, appropriate to modern conditions. As a result, the process of legal development provides an illuminating perspective on the character of American political thought in a formative period of the nation.

This book explores two basic questions regarding constitutional theory. First, in view of a commitment to democratic self-rule and widespread disagreement on questions of value, how is the creation of a legitimate constitutional regime possible? Second, what must be true about a constitution if the regime that it supports is to retain its claim to legitimacy? Howard Schweber shows that the answers to these questions appear in a theory of constitutional language that combines democratic theory with constitutional philosophy. The creation of a legitimate constitutional regime depends on a shared commitment to a particular and specialized form of language. Out of this simple observation, Schweber develops arguments about the characteristics of constitutional language, the necessary differences between constitutional language and the language of ordinary law or morality, as well as the authority of officials such as judges to engage in constitutional review of laws.