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Liberal constitutionalism embodies an aspiration to public moral justification. The practice of liberal politics, on this view, is bound up with an ongoing effort to justify our political arrangements to one another, an effort that must not be collapsed into the mere affirmation of community standards or conventions. This ideal of public justification lends support to judicial review, an institution that helps make constitutional government a publicly principled enterprise. But it also suggests the value of drawing the "political" branches into the interpretive project: the Supreme Court is not the final interpreter of our Constitution's liberal public morality. The "political" branches of the national government, and citizens themselves play a crucial role in the interpretive process. Viewed in this way, the theory and practice of constitutionalism embody ideals of virtue, citizenship, and community that add up to positive rejoinders to liberalism's communitarian and republican critics.

The jurisprudence of the US New Right would corrode the public role of reasonableness in constitutional self-government. Underlying the resort to US Constitutional "framers' intentions" is a commitment to majority power bolstered by a skeptical rejection of moral rights. A vigorous judiciary can both protect rights & insist that the reasons for laws become public. Constitutionalism requires that all public officials & citizens recognize their duty to interpret our public morality. A firmer judicial insistence on legislative reasonableness should extend to the sphere of economic legislation. A "principled judicial activism" might politicize the Constitution, but it could also constitutionalize & elevate US politics. The work of New Right figures like Robert H. Bork & Edwin Meese is critically examined, & their views are contrasted with those of representatives of liberal constitutionalism, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Ronald Dworkin. AA

The authors ofHabits of the Heart(Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton; hereafter, simply Bellah) charge that America is losing the institutions that help "to create the kind of person who could sustain a connection to a wider political community and thus ultimately support the maintenance of free institutions." Bellah fears that "individualism may have grown cancerous – that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentials, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself."Proponents of the liberal free market order should, I will argue, take seriously the concerns that motivate Bellah and company: citizens of a liberal regime cannot live by exchanges alone. Liberal constitutionalism depends upon a certain level and quality of citizen virtue. But while the need for virtue is often neglected by liberal theorists, it is far from clear that the actual workings of liberal institutions have drastically undermined virtue in the way Bellah's dire account suggests. That analysis serves, moreover, as the springboard for a radically transformist argument that seeks, not so much to elevate and shape, but to transcend and deny, the self-interestedness that the free market exercises. Having argued against Bellah's analysis and prescriptions, I shall attempt to show how the phenomena he describes are open to an interpretation that is happier from the point of view of a concern with virtue. I shall end by using Tocqueville to suggest that combining liberal capitalism with intermediate associations like voluntary groups and state and local government helps elevate and shape self-interest, promoting a citizenry capable of and insistent upon liberal self-government.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Purpose, Scope, Method -- Part I. The work of the convention -- 1 Creating a Republican Executive -- 2 Debate Begins on the Presidency -- 3 Election and Removal -- 4 The Audacious Innovations of the Committee of Detail -- 5 Completing the Executive -- 6 Ratification Debates -- Part II. Allocating royal powers -- 7 The Framers' General Theory of Allocating Powers -- 8 The Core Legislative Powers of Taxing and Lawmaking -- 9 The President's Legislative Powers -- 10 The Power to Control Law Execution -- 11 Foreign Affairs and War -- 12 Other Prerogative Powers -- Part III. the logical structure of article II -- 13 The Executive Power Vesting Clause -- 14 The Logic of the Organization of Article II -- 15 The Three Varieties of Presidential Power -- Part IV. illustrative examples -- 16 Two Classic Cases -- 17 Three Presidents, Three Conflicts -- 18 The Administrative State -- Conclusion -- Short-Form Citations -- Notes -- Index

Constitutional democracy is at once a flourishing idea filled with optimism and promise-and an enterprise fraught with limitations. Uncovering the reasons for this ambivalence, this book looks at the difficulties of constitutional democracy, and reexamines fundamental questions: What is constitutional democracy? When does it succeed or fail? Can constitutional democracies conduct war? Can they preserve their values and institutions while addressing new forms of global interdependence? The authors gathered here interrogate constitutional democracy's meaning in order to illuminate its future. The book examines key themes-the issues of constitutional failure, the problem of emergency power and whether constitutions should be suspended when emergencies arise; the dilemmas faced when constitutions-provide and restrict executive power during wartime; and whether constitutions can adapt to such globalization challenges as immigration, religious resurgence, and nuclear arms proliferation. --From publisher's description.

Does the United States have the right to defend itself by striking first, or must it wait until an attack is in progress? Is the Bush Doctrine of aggressive preventive action a justified and legal recourse against threats posed by terrorists and rogue states? Tackling one of the most controversial policy issues of the post-September 11 world, Michael Doyle argues that neither the Bush Doctrine nor customary international law is capable of adequately responding to the pressing security threats of our times. In Striking First, Doyle shows how the Bush Doctrine has consistently disregarded a vita.

As the principles and practices of democracy continue to spread ever more widely, it is hard to imagine a corner of the globe into which they will not eventually penetrate. But the euphoria of democratic revolutions is typically short-lived, and usually followed by disgruntlement and even cynicism about the actual operation of democratic institutions. It is widely accepted that democracy is a good thing. However democrats have much work to do in improving the performance of democratic institutions. The essays in this volume focus on this difficult and vital challenge: how can we improve the de

As the principles and practices of democracy continue to spread ever more widely, it is hard to imagine a corner of the globe into which they will not eventually penetrate. But the euphoria of democratic revolutions is typically short-lived, and usually followed by disgruntlement and even cynicism about the actual operation of democratic institutions. It is widely accepted that democracy is a good thing. However democrats have much work to do in improving the performance of democratic institutions. The essays in this volume focus on this difficult and vital challenge: how can we improve the de.

The idea for a Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) did not suddenly dawn upon Senate Republicans in the summer of 2004, when debate on the amendment began in earnest on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Despite the passage of the federal Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, conservatives have long worried about what they believe are the threats to traditional heterosexual marriage posed by the courts. Their fears peaked in 2003, when the courts struck twice: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that state homosexual sodomy laws are unconstitutional, while the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health ordered state officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.