Reflections On Constitutional Law

Constitutional scholar George Anastaplo believes that many judges and lawyers draw upon a skimpy, if not simply unreliable, knowledge of history. He proposes that in order to write reliable opinions, these men and women must have a deeper understanding of the enduring principles upon which the law naturally tends to draw. In the study of constitutional law, Anastaplo argues that it is more important to weigh what the Supreme Court has said and how that is said—what considerations it weighed and how—than it is to know what it is recorded that the Court “decided.” In Reflections on Constitutional Law, Anastaplo makes the case for a renewed focus on a now often-overlooked aspect of the study of law. He emphasizes the continuing significance and importance of the Constitution by thoroughly examining the most important influences on the American constitutional system, including the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence.

Constitutional scholar George Anastaplo believes that many judges and lawyers draw upon a skimpy, if not simply unreliable, knowledge of history. He proposes that in order to write reliable opinions, these men and women must have a deeper understanding of the enduring principles upon which the law naturally tends to draw. In the study of constitutional law, Anastaplo argues that it is more important to weigh what the Supreme Court has said and how that is said -- what considerations it weighed and how -- than it is to know what it is recorded that the Court "decided." In Reflections on Constitutional Law, Anastaplo makes the case for a renewed focus on a now often-overlooked aspect of the study of law. He emphasizes the continuing significance and importance of the Constitution by thoroughly examining the most important influences on the American constitutional system, including the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence.

The role of law in government has been increasingly scrutinized as courts struggle with controversial topics such as assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, capital punishment, and torture. Reflections on Life, Death, and the Constitution explores such issues by using classical standards of morality as a starting point for understanding them. Drawing on works of literature and philosophy, and on U.S. Supreme Court decisions, George Anastaplo examines the intimate relationship between human nature and constitutional law.

In this insightful book about constitutional law and slavery, George Anastaplo illuminates both how the history of race relations in the United States should be approached and how seemingly hopeless social and political challenges can be usefully considered through the lens of the U.S. Constitution. He examines the outbreak of the American Civil War, its prosecution, and its aftermath, tracing the concept of slavery and law from its earliest beginnings and slavery’s fraught legal history within the United States. Anastaplo offers discussions that bring into focus discussions of slavery in Ancient Greece and within the Bible, showing their influence on the Constitution and the subsequent political struggles that led to the Civil War.

The guarantee of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights draws upon two millennia of Western thought about the value and necessity of free inquiry. Acclaimed legal scholar George Anastaplo traces the philosophical development of the idea of free inquiry from Plato's Apology to Socrates to John Milton's Areopagitica. He describes how these seminal texts and others by such diverse thinkers as St. Paul, Thomas More, and John Stuart Mill influenced the formation and the earliest applications of the First Amendment. Anastaplo also focuses on the critical free speech implications of a dozen Supreme Court cases and shows how First Amendment interpretations have evolved in response to modern events. Reflections on Freedom of Speech and the First Amendment grounds its vision of America's most basic freedoms in the intellectual traditions of Western political philosophy, providing crucial insight into the legal challenges of the future through the lens of the past.

This timely book offers a novel theory of constitutional revolutions, providing a new and engaging framework for critically assessing how revolutions and contra-revolutions, transitional periods and the phenomenon of oblivion influence constitutional change.

Rev. and expanded ed. of : The conservative constitution. c1990.