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Americans often think about constitutional law in terms of high-profile decisions by the Supreme Court - decisions that divide the justices by ideology, not law. This focus often leads to the erroneous conclusion that constitutional law arguments are, and can only be, political in substance. In The Practice of American Constitutional Law, H. Jefferson Powell demonstrates that there is a longstanding, shared practice of constructing and evaluating constitutional law claims that transcends current political disagreements. Powell describes how lawyers and judges identify constitutional problems by using a specifiable method of inquiry that enables them to agree on what the questions are, and thus what any plausible answer must address, even when disagreement over the most persuasive answers remains. Rather than being simply politics by other means, constitutional law is the successful practice of giving substance to the Constitution as supreme law

A centerpiece of the U.S. government's current war against international terrorism is targeted killing by unmanned drone aircraft. The executive branch insists that it limits the use of drone strikes to conform with all relevant legal norms but also that those norms permit the killing of a U.S. citizen who meets the targeting criteria: The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011 was the first acknowledged strike against a citizen. The legality as well as the wisdom of the government's policies are hotly debated, and this book analyzes the constitutionality of the killing of al-Awlaki as a lens for examining the lawfulness of the drone strike policies in general.

The authors of this book share a concern for the state of law and democracy in our country, which to many seems to have deteriorated badly. Deep changes are visible in a wide array of phenomena: judicial opinions, the teaching of law, legal practice, international relations, legal scholarship, congressional deliberations, and the culture of contemporary politics. In each of these intersections between law, culture, and politics, traditional expectations have been transformed in ways that pose a threat to the continued vitality and authority of law and democracy. The authors analyze specific instances in which such a decline has occurred or is threatened, tracing them to "the empire of force," a phrase borrowed from Simone Weil. This French intellectual applied the term not only to the brute force used by police and soldiers but, more broadly, to the underlying ways of thinking, talking, and imagining that make that sort of force possible, including propaganda, unexamined ideology, sentimental clichés, and politics by buzzwords, all familiar cultural forms. Based on the underlying crisis and its causes, the editors and authors of these essays agree that neither law nor democracy can survive where the empire of force dominates. Yet each manages to find a ground for hope in our legal and democratic culture. H. Jefferson Powell is Frederic Cleaveland Professor of Law and Divinity at Duke University and has served in both the federal and state governments, as a deputy assistant attorney general and as principal deputy solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice and as special counsel to the attorney general of North Carolina. His latest book is Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision. James Boyd White is Hart Wright Professor of Law emeritus and Professor of English emeritus, at the University of Michigan. His latest book is Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. "An extraordinary collection of provocative, insightful, and inspiring essays on the future of law and democracy in the twenty-first century."--Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago "These thoughtful essays diagnose democracy's perilous present, and--more importantly--they explore avenues to democracy's rescue through humanization of law."--Kenneth L. Karst, David G. Price and Dallas P. Price Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA Contributors Martin Böhmer, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argenti ...