The Nature of American Constitutionalism

Author(s):  
Edward A. Jr. Purcell

This chapter examines the third reason for Justice Antonin Scalia’s enduring historical significance for an understanding of American constitutionalism. The chapter argues that he was a man of his times, who adapted “conservative” politics and values to meet what he saw as the abuses of the Warren Court and twentieth-century liberalism. To counter broad assertions of federal legislative and judicial power, he developed doctrines to limit both of those branches, and to counter liberal attempts to limit presidential power after Watergate, he developed doctrines to expand the power of the executive. The chapter criticizes his embrace of positivism and his ideas about both law and the rule of law. It also argues that the nature of “conservatism” has evolved and changed over the decades and that Scalia’s jurisprudence broke with the conservative jurisprudence of the pre-Reagan era. The chapter concludes that Scalia’s jurisprudence and career demonstrate—contrary to his central jurisprudential claims—the third fundamental characteristic of American constitutionalism, its truly “living” nature.

Author(s):  
Edward A. Purcell, Jr.

Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism is a critical study of Justice Antonin Scalia’s jurisprudence, his work on the U.S. Supreme Court, and his significance for an understanding of American constitutionalism. After tracing Scalia’s emergence as a hero of the political right and his opposition to many of the decisions of the Warren Court, this book examines his general jurisprudential theory of originalism and textualism, arguing that he failed to produce either the objective method he claimed or the “correct” constitutional results he promised. Focusing on his judicial performance over his thirty years on the Court, the book examines his opinions on virtually all of the constitutional issues he addressed, from fundamentals of structure to most major constitutional provisions. The book argues that Scalia applied his jurisprudential theories in inconsistent ways and often ignored, twisted, or abandoned the interpretive methods he proclaimed, in most cases reaching results that were consistent with “conservative” politics and the ideology of the post-Reagan Republican Party. Most broadly, it argues that Scalia’s jurisprudence and career are particularly significant because they exemplify—contrary to his own persistent claims—three paramount characteristics of American constitutionalism: the inherent inadequacy of “originalism” and other formal interpretive methodologies to produce “correct” answers to controverted constitutional questions; the relationship—particularly close in Scalia’s case—between constitutional interpretations on one hand and substantive personal and political goals on the other; and the truly and unavoidably “living” nature of American constitutionalism itself. As a historical matter, the book concludes, Scalia stands as a towering figure of irony because his judicial career disproved the central claims of his own jurisprudence.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
Tobias Berger

This chapter embeds contemporary translations of ‘the rule of law’ in their historical trajectory. It reveals how the introduction of village courts by the colonial administration at the dawn of the twentieth century and current efforts by international donor agencies to activate these village courts follow strikingly similar logics. The village courts are therefore neither an exclusively global imposition nor an ostensibly local institution; instead, they have emerged in complex processes of translation in which the global and the local have become inseparably intertwined. Having reconstructed this historical trajectory, the chapter also provides a brief overview of Bangladesh’s recent political history and maps the country’s contemporary legal landscape.


Author(s):  
Henk Addink

The pivotal aim of this book is to explain the creation, development, and impact of good governance from a conceptual, principal perspective and in the context of national administrative law. Three lines of reasoning have been worked out: developing the concept of good governance; specification of this concept by developing principles of good governance; and implementation of these principles of good governance on the national level. In this phase of further development of good governance, it is important to have a clear concept of good governance, presented in this book as the third cornerstone of a modern state, alongside the concepts of the rule of law and democracy. That is a rather new national administrative law perspective which is influenced by regional and international legal developments; thus, we can speak about good governance as a multilevel concept. But the question is: how is this concept of good governance further developed? Six principles of good governance (which in a narrower sense also qualify as principles of good administration) have been further specified in a systematic way, from a legal perspective. These are the principles of properness, transparency, participation, effectiveness, accountability, and human rights. Furthermore, the link has been made with integrity standards. The important developments of each of these principles are described on the national level in Europe, but also in countries outside Europe (such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa). This book gives a systematic comparison of the implementation of the principles of good governance between countries.


Author(s):  
Matthew Hobson

This chapter provides a brief introduction to how the historiographical development of Roman studies, since mid-twentieth century decolonization, has altered our understanding of the developments which took place in North Africa following the destruction of Carthage in 146 bce. The reader is introduced to literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources of evidence, which have traditionally been used to argue for either cultural change or continuity. After an initial examination of the immediate aftermath of the Third Punic War, Roman land appropriation and taxation, the focus is on sources of evidence usually described as “Punic,” “neo-Punic” or “Late Punic,” covering the spheres of municipal institutions, language use, and religious and funerary rituals. The vibrant multiculturalism and regional diversity of the Mediterranean and especially North Africa, both before and after the Roman conquest, is the dominant theme. This is used to shift emphasis away from grand explanatory paradigms based on essentialist identity categories, and toward a more nuanced picture of the complex and multivariate processes of cultural development and integration.


Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski

This chapter examines music in the British workplace. It considers whether it is appropriate to see the history of music in the workplace as involving a journey from the organic singing voice (both literal and metaphorical) of workers to broadcast music appropriated by the powerful to become a technique of social control. The chapter charts four key stages in the social history of music in British workplaces. First, it highlights the existence of widespread cultures of singing at work prior to industrialization, and outlines the important meanings these cultures had for workers. Next, it outlines the silencing of the singing voice within the workplace further to industrialization—either from direct employer bans on singing, or from the roar of the industrial noise. The third key stage involves the carefully controlled employer- and state-led reintroduction of music in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century—through the centralized relaying of specific forms of music via broadcast systems in workplaces. The chapter ends with an examination of contemporary musicking in relation to (often worker-led) radio music played in workplaces.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Lukas J. Dorfbauer

In 2016 Justin Stover published an important editio princeps of a fragmentarily preserved text that was originally discovered by Raymond Klibansky in the first half of the twentieth century: a kind of Summarium librorum Platonis which Klibansky took as a Latin translation of a lost Greek original, whereas Stover argues it was written by Apuleius, namely as the third book of his De Platone. The following notes deal primarily with details pertaining to the constitution of the text, but I will start with one remark on a detail of Stover's translation and close with a discussion concerning the alleged medieval reception of the so-called ‘New Apuleius’. Chapters, pages, Latin text, apparatus criticus entries, and translations are quoted according to Stover's edition; all bold highlights are mine, as are all translations from works other than the ‘New Apuleius’ if not indicated otherwise.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2110037
Author(s):  
João Pedro Fróis

In this essay I look at the art of children as a tool in the medical-pedagogical approach, as proposed by the founder of child psychiatry in Portugal, Vítor Fontes (1893–1979). First, the topic of the art of children is introduced, and the second part focuses on the model of medical pedagogy as it was practised in Portugal. The third and fourth parts present Fontes’s own investigations on the drawings of children with intellectual disabilities under observation at the Instituto Médico-Pedagógico António Aurélio da Costa Ferreira (IAACF) in Lisbon. In the conclusion it is argued that Fontes contributed to the development of child psychiatry in Portugal by showing that children’s art can mirror their cognitive and emotional development.


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