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The Supreme Court has been at the center of great upheavals in American democracy across the last seventy years. From the end of Jim Crow to the rise of wealth-dominated national campaigns, the Court has battled over if democracy is an egalitarian collaboration to serve the good of all citizens, or a competitive struggle by private interests. In The Law of Freedom, Jacob Eisler questions why the Court has the moral authority to shape democracy at all. Analyzing leading cases through the lens of philosophy and social science, Eisler demonstrates how the soul of election law is a battle between two philosophical understandings of democratic freedom and popular self-rule. This remarkable book reveals that the Court's battle over democracy has shaped how Americans rule themselves, marking election law as the most dramatic judicial intervention in constitutional history.
An urgent and gripping look at the erosion of voting rights and its implications for democracy, told through the stories of 9 Supreme Court decisions—and the next looming case In The Court v. The Voters, law professor Joshua Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting rights—some surprising and unknown, some familiar—to investigate the historic crossroads that have irrevocably changed our elections and the nation. In crisp and accessible prose, Douglas tells the story of each case, sheds light on the intractable election problems we face as a result, and highlights the unique role the highest court has played in producing a broken electoral system. Douglas charts ...
Gold Nautilus Award Winner: “A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mess we are in today and what we need to do.” —George Halvorson, former CEO, Kaiser Permanente We are living in a time of mounting political segregation that threatens to tear us apart as a unified society. As we become increasingly tribal, the narratives of life that we get exposed to on a daily basis have become echo chambers in which we hear our beliefs reinforced and others’ beliefs demonized. At the core of tribalism exists a paradox: As humans, we are hardwired with the need to belong, which ends up making us deeply connected with some yet deeply divided from others. When these tribes are formed out...
In the last half of the 1850s, the Virginia counties of Cabell and Wayne became immersed in the national debate over slavery. Located only a stone’s throw away from the free state of Ohio, some western Virginians practiced and defended slavery, and the contentiousness between supporters and those who opposed the institution increased dramatically as the nation moved closer to civil war. When the conflict erupted in 1861, disorder was the order of the day. Although the overwhelming majority of voters in Cabell and Wayne counties opposed the Ordinance of Secession, the most prominent and influential citizens in the area favored leaving the Union. When the state seceded, some who had opposed ...
Examines LatCrit’s emergence as a scholarly and activist community within and beyond the US legal academy Emerging from the US legal academy in 1995, LatCrit theory is a genre of critical outsider jurisprudence—a vital hub of contemporary scholarship that includes Feminist Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory, among other critical schools of legal knowledge. Its basic goals have been: (1) to develop a critical, activist, and inter-disciplinary discourse on law and society affecting Latinas/os/x, and (2) to foster both the development of coalitional theory and practice as well as the accessibility of this knowledge to agents of social and legal transformative change. This slim volume tel...
No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the pro...
Some of theater’s most powerful works in the past thirty years fall into the category of "verbatim theater," socially engaged performances whose texts rely on word-for-word testimony. Performances such as Fires in the Mirror, The Laramie Project, and The Vagina Monologues have at their best demonstrated how to hold hard conversations about explosive subjects in a liberal democracy. But in this moment of what author Ryan Claycomb terms the “rightward lurch” of western democracies, does this idealized space of democratic deliberation remain effective? In the Lurch asks that question in a pointed and self-reflexive way, tracing the history of this branch of documentary theater with partic...
Leading scholars examine the law governing the American presidential nomination process and offer practical ideas for reform.
Election law plays a critical role in regulating the political arena at a time when Americans are witnessing unprecedented levels of polarization. The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law provides a comprehensive overview of the field, a survey of core themes, and summaries of the most pressing debates. Bringing together 47 leading scholars of election law, the Handbook offers readers a clearly written guide to aid navigation through this complex area, tackling controversial issues and situating them within the field's ongoing scholarly dialogue. Unparalleled in the breadth and depth of its coverage, The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, policymakers, and practitioners.