Posts Tagged Constitution
Tea Party Originalism
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Random Blogging on February 13th, 2011
David Schultz is a colleague (and co-author of my recent textbook, American Public Service: Constitutional and Ethical Foundations) who has written a timely article for Salon. It’s the sort of article that should be read by the very folks who won’t read it, because it actually takes one of the Tea Party’s avowed purposes—constitutional originalism—seriously. [...]
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Framing the Framework
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Constitution on February 11th, 2011
Eliot Spitzer may be defective in sexual morality (not to mention taste), but he made a very important point in a recent speech reported by ACS–the American Constitution Society. As the ACS blog put it: Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, during a keynote speech at an ACS event examining corporations’ influence on the federal [...]
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A Constitutional Culture
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Constitution on January 23rd, 2011
In the wake of the horrific shooting in Tucson last month, PBS’ Mark Shields made an “only in America” observation. “This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a [...]
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When Will We Ever Learn?
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Random Blogging on August 26th, 2010
There was an anti-war song from the sixties that I always loved, titled “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The refrain was “oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?” I’ve thought about that refrain a lot lately, as America has increasingly retreated into one of the ugliest nativist episodes in a [...]
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Void for Vagueness
Posted by Sheila Kennedy in Constitution on November 18th, 2009
One of the most difficult constitutional principles to teach, for reasons I really don’t understand, is the rule that in order to be constituional, a law must be sufficiently precise to allow citizens to know what behaviors will be sanctioned. If a law does not meet that standard, we say it is “void for vagueness.” [...]
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