Suchergebnisse

For the past forty years, prominent pro-life activists, judges and politicians have invoked the history and legacy of American slavery to elucidate aspects of contemporary abortion politics. As is often the case, many of these popular analogies have been imprecise, underdeveloped and historically simplistic. In Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning, Justin Buckley Dyer provides the first book-length scholarly treatment of the parallels between slavery and abortion in American constitutional development. In this fascinating and wide-ranging study, Dyer demonstrates that slavery and abortion really are historically, philosophically and legally intertwined in America. The nexus, however, is subtler and more nuanced than is often suggested, and the parallels involve deep principles of constitutionalism

For the past forty years, prominent pro-life activists, judges and politicians have invoked the history and legacy of American slavery to elucidate aspects of contemporary abortion politics. As is often the case, many of these popular analogies have been imprecise, underdeveloped and historically simplistic. In Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning, Justin Buckley Dyer provides the first book-length scholarly treatment of the parallels between slavery and abortion in American constitutional development. In this fascinating and wide-ranging study, Dyer demonstrates that slavery and abortion really are historically, philosophically and legally intertwined in America. The nexus, however, is subtler and more nuanced than is often suggested, and the parallels involve deep principles of constitutionalism

ABSTRACT
Written as a short personal reflection, this article explores the development of political science as an organized professional discipline in the United States. At its inception, political science in the United States was principally concerned with political thought and constitutionalism, and it was taught with the public-spirited purpose of educating for citizenship in a constitutional democracy. Twentieth-century methodological trends at one time threatened to remove political thought and constitutionalism from the curriculum of political science, but recent disciplinary trends suggest that American political thought does have a place in twenty-first-century political science.

AbstractA comparison of two U.S. Supreme Court cases about fundamental rights, one on slavery, the other on abortion, sheds light on constitutional law and the principles undergirding liberal constitutional democracy. The Dred Scott case in 1857 denied constitutional rights to enslaved Africans and their descendants living in the United States. The Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 created a constitutional right to abortion that denied constitutional personhood to human beings prior to birth. Both cases involved applications of what legal scholars call "substantive due process"—that is, a substantive interpretation of the constitutional requirement that governments provide persons with "due process of law" that moves beyond procedural formalism. Although many constitutional scholars deny the legitimacy of substantive due process as a legal doctrine, this article proposes that the judicial system cannot ultimately avoid substantive moral questions in constitutional interpretation. In both cases examined here, the crucial question was about who counts as part of the people whom the Constitution protects, and that question could not be answered in purely formal terms. Both Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade erred not by engaging substantive moral questions but rather by denying, in different ways, the natural rights of human persons.

If English and American constitutional thought rests on one shared foundation, it is the principle that executive power, in order to be legitimate, must be subject to law. In the thirteenth century, the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that "the law makes the King"—rather than the King makes the law—and urged, "Let the King … bestow upon the law what the law bestows upon him, namely dominion and power, for there is no King where will rules and not law" (White 1908, 268). Bracton no doubt had in mind some of the recent provisions of the Magna Carta (1215), which provided a formal codification of this principle. The rebel barons who imposed the Magna Carta on King John were animated by a desire to limit arbitrary executive power, and, in Article 39, they secured a promise from the monarchy that "no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned, or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land" (Turner 2003, 231). In the fourteenth century, Article 39 was redrafted by Parliament to apply not only to free men but also to any man "of whatever estate or condition he may be," and this process of reinterpretation continued throughout the next several centuries as Parliament expanded "the Charter's special 'liberties' for the privileged classes to general guarantees of 'liberty' for all the king's subjects" (Turner 2003, 3).