The Oxford Handbook of the U.S. Constitution

Mark Tushnet · Mark A. Graber · Sanford Levinson

Jul 2015 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

The Oxford Handbook of the U.S. Constitution offers a comprehensive overview and introduction to the U.S. Constitution from the perspectives of history, political science, law, rights, and constitutional themes, while focusing on its development, structures, rights, and role in the U.S. political system and culture. This Handbook enables readers within and beyond the U.S. to develop a critical comprehension of the literature on the Constitution, along with accessible and up-to-date analysis. The historical essays included in this Handbook cover the Constitution from 1620 right through the Reagan Revolution to the present. Essays on political science detail how contemporary citizens in the United States rely extensively on political parties, interest groups, and bureaucrats to operate a constitution designed to prevent the rise of parties, interest-group politics and an entrenched bureaucracy. The essays on law explore how contemporary citizens appear to expect and accept the exertions of power by a Supreme Court, whose members are increasingly disconnected from the world of practical politics. Essays on rights discuss how contemporary citizens living in a diverse multi-racial society seek guidance on the meaning of liberty and equality, from a Constitution designed for a society in which all politically relevant persons shared the same race, gender, religion and ethnicity. Lastly, the essays on themes explain how in a "globalized" world, people living in the United States can continue to be governed by a constitution originally meant for a society geographically separated from the rest of the "civilized world." Whether a return to the pristine constitutional institutions of the founding or a translation of these constitutional norms in the present is possible remains the central challenge of U.S. constitutionalism today.

About the author

Mark Tushnet is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is the co-author of a number of books, including the most widely used casebook on constitutional law, Constitutional Law (with Stone, Seidman, and Sunstein). Professor Tushnet is the former president of the American Association of Law Schools. Mark A. Graber is the Jacob A. France Professor of Constitutionalism at the University of Maryland's Francis King Carey School of Law. Professor Graber is the author of many books and articles focusing on American constitutional law, development, theory, and politics. He is the author of A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism (Oxford 2013); Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (2006); Rethinking Abortion (1996). Professor Graber is the former section head of the Law and Courts section the APSA and the Constitutional Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools. Sanford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School, Austin. His books include: Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford, 2013); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) (Oxford, 2008); Constitutional Faith; Wrestling with Diversity. Professor Levinson received the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.