NextGen Bar Exam: Constitutional Law

This book contains an analysis and excerpts of court decisions but also highlights the efforts of legislatures, executives, and the states. This book encourages the general public to participate in an ongoing political dialogue rather than passively receiving unilateral judicial commands. It also covers all new developments in case law, congressional statutes, presidential policies, and initiatives undertaken by states under their own constitutions. There is also a substantially revised chapter on equal protection that addresses immigration law and the rights of aliens, which includes readings not only from cases but congressional floor debates, committee reports, committee hearings, presidential vetoes and other statements, state actions, Federalist papers, and professional journals.

This book explores the American polity as both a constitutional and democratic entity. This volume is organized around a set of basic interrogatives: What is the constitution to be interpreted? Who are its authoritative interpreters? How do they go about their interpretive tasks?

Written for first-year constitutional law students, American Constitutional Law and History has four goals: First, it gives students an understanding of constitutional law doctrine, as well as the unstable nature of that doctrine. Second, it introduces students to the recurring types of accepted justifications by the members of the Court for the exercise of judicial review, the duty, in John Marshall's famous words, "to say what the law is." Third, the book provides students with a sense of how constitutional decision-making has changed in different historical periods and how those changes have affected the present Court's understanding of the Constitution. Finally, American Constitutional Law and History shows students how to name and use regularly recurring forms of legal arguments, such as analogical reasoning, syllogisms, re-framing by varying the level of generality, and a group of arguments characterized as "rhetorical" arguments such as the slippery slope and famous dead person (appeal to authority) arguments.

A leading text by a prominent scholar, Constitutional Law is known for its concise yet comprehensive presentation. Professor Chemerinsky’s distinctive approach for the Sixth Edition presents the law solely through case excerpts and his own essays. With the author’s context and background information, the law becomes more readily understood. A flexible organization accommodates a variety of course structures; no chapter assumes that students have read the preceding material.

This book is part of a two-volume set that highlights the role of politics in the development of constitutional law. It covers Americans' various rights to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, while it also examines cases that have addressed both discrimination and defendants' rights.

Justice Deferred comprehensively charts the Court’s race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America’s racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justices’ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings.

Written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers explain the complexities of a constitutional government—its political structure and principles based on the inherent rights of man. Scholars have long regarded this work as a milestone in political science and a classic of American political theory.
Based on the original McLean edition of 1788 and edited by noted historian Clinton Rossiter, this special edition includes:
● Textual notes and a select bibliography by Charles R. Kesler
● Table of contents with a brief précis of each essay
● Appendix with a copy of the Constitution cross-referenced to The Federalist Papers
● Index of Ideas that lists the major political concepts discussed
● Copies of The Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation

For a quarter of a century, between 1763 and 1788, Americans intensely debated the nature of government and the need to protect individual liberties. The debate climaxed in the arguments over the ratification of the Constitution. Through a selection of essential documents from 1787 and 1788, this new edition gives readers the flavor and immediacy of the great debate in all its fire, brilliance, and political intensity. Organized by topic, this is a convenient reference and teaching tool. This updated edition contains a new section on the debate over class structure, property rights, and the economy under the proposed Constitution―an ideal introduction to a debate meaningful today.

The Bill of Rights in Modern America captures the contentious national debate about the nature and extent of our individual rights. Free speech, the separation of church and state, public safety and gun control, property rights, the rights of criminals and victims, the limits of law enforcement, the death penalty, affirmative action, the right to privacy, abortion, states' rights―the Bill of Rights has been evoked as the legal basis for every one of these issues. Twelve distinguished legal scholars discuss the history of and the current debates on these and other important rights issues in a book that will stimulate thoughtful discussion among all citizens.

Are the profound insights of Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Felix Frankfurter that have defined our cherished Bill of Rights fatally flawed? With meticulous historical scholarship and elegant legal interpretation, a leading Constitutional law scholar boldly answers yes as he explores conventional wisdom about the first ten amendments to the U.S.

Constitutionalism: Past, Present, and Future is the definitive collection of Dieter Grimm's most influential . The essays included in this volume explore the conditions under which the modern constitution could emerge; they treat the characteristics that must be given if the constitution may be called an achievement, the appropriate way to understand and interpret constitutional law under current conditions, the function of judicial review, the remaining role of national constitutions in a changing world, as well as the possibility of supra-national constitutionalism.

This book, whose author has worked as a state's attorney in the U.S. and Canada, examines the path from British rule to self-nationhood in both countries. He examines the tumultuous and often bloody path to acquiring freedom from a host country and the mechanisms behind setting up a country with federalism.

The Law Quarterly Review praised this book upon publication, noting that "great learning is manifest in these pages" (cited in Marke). McIlwain [1871-1968] examines the rise of constitutionalism from the "democratic strands" in the works of Aristotle and Cicero through the transitional moment between the medieval and the modern eras. He concludes with a discussion of the forces of despotism threatening constitutionally based individual freedom in the 1930s.

Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution's origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. The framers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse America's post–Revolutionary War slide into democracy. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans.
Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment. And the linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. Holton captures how the same class of Americans that produced Shays's Rebellion produced the Constitution we now have.

Using the British Empire as a case study, this succinct study argues that the establishment of overseas settlements in America created a problem of constitutional organization that created deep and persistent tensions within the empire during the colonial era and that the failure to resolve it was the principal element in the decision of thirteen continental colonies to secede from the empire in 1776. Challenging those historians who have assumed that the British had the law on their side during the debates that led to the American Revolution, this volume argues that the empire had long exhibited a high degree of constitutional multiplicity, with each colony having its own discrete constitution and the empire as whole having an uncodified working customary constitution that determined the way authority was distributed within the empire. Contending that these constitutions cannot be conflated with the metropolitan British constitution, it argues that British refusal to accept the legitimacy of colonial understandings of the sanctity of the many colonial constitutions and the imperial constitution was the critical element leading to the American Revolution

Despite its venerated place atop American law and politics, our written Constitution does not enumerate all modern America. The document does not explicitly mention cherished concepts like the separation of powers and the rule of law. On some issues, the plain meaning of the text misleads. For example, the text seems to say that the vice president presides over his own impeachment trial—but surely this cannot be right. As esteemed legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar explains in America's Unwritten Constitution, the solution to many constitutional puzzles lies not solely within the written document but beyond it—in the vast trove of values, precedents, and practices that complement and complete the terse text.

This collection of 1500 quotes from more than 1000 Supreme Court decisions. These excerpts, dating from the beginning of the Republic, are arranged to include the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; states' rights; due process; free speech; equal rights; and freedom of religion.

Levinson asks what the original assumptions underlying our institutions are and whether we accept those assumptions 225 years later.
In Framed, Levinson challenges our belief that the most important feature of constitutional concern is what rights they protect. Instead, he focuses on the fundamental governance procedures, such as congressional bicameralism, the selection of the President by the electoral college, and the dimensions of the President's veto power--not to mention the near impossibility of amending the United States Constitution. These seemingly "settled" and "hardwired" structures contribute to the now almost universally recognized "dysfunctionality" of American politics. Further, Levinson argues that we should stop treating the Constitution as uniquely exemplifying the American constitutional tradition and instead concentrate on making the system of government more effectively responsive to contemporary challenges so that making ‘fundamental’ changes as needed becomes part of the system rather than impossible.

Breslin lays out and explains the basic functions of a modern constitution―including creating a new citizenry, structuring the institutions of government, regulating conflict between layers and branches of government, and limiting the sovereign's power. He also discusses the theoretical concepts behind the fundamentals of written constitutions and thoroughly examines some of the most important constitutional charters worldwide. In assaying how states put structural ideas into practice, Breslin asks probing questions about why―and if―constitutions matter.
Breslin draws a critically important distinction between constitutional texts and constitutional practice.

These two volumes provide a complete guide to a pivotal moment in the formation of the United States and the Constitutional Convention that created one of the most important documents in history, the United States Constitution.
Drawing on original sources and a wealth of secondary works and recent scholarship, updated entries, and dozens of illuminating side boxes, this book presents a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the Constitutional Convention.

The Supreme Court Compendium provides historical and statistical information on the Supreme Court: its institutional development; caseload; decision trends; the background, nomination, and voting behavior of its justices; its relationship with public, governmental, and other judicial bodies; and its impact.

Lawyer and scholar Robert J. McWhirter's monumental history of the Bill of Rights traces the origins of the amendments over the span of nearly a thousand years, with many tangents into the history of literature, religion, film, sports, and popular culture, and ensures that his fellow citizens will be well-armed to defend their rights.

This book has over 500 A–Z entries on amendments, proposed amendments, alternate constitutions, and amending issues. It also offers a chronology of the most popular amending proposals by year and key events and publications related to constitutional amendments; however, much of its focus comes from an extensive bibliography that includes primary documents, including the U.S. Constitution and its amendments. A comprehensive index is also included.