By Michael Stokes Paulsen
The structure: An Introduction is the definitive sleek primer at the US structure. Michael Stokes Paulsen, one of many nation’s such a lot provocative and entire students of the structure, and his son Luke Paulsen, a proficient younger author and lay pupil, have mixed to jot down a full of life advent to the very best legislation of the U.S., masking the Constitution’s heritage and which means in transparent, available terms.
Beginning with the Constitution’s beginning in 1787, Paulsen and Paulsen supply a grand journey of its provisions, ideas, and interpretation, introducing readers to the characters and controversies that experience formed the structure within the 200-plus years given that its production. alongside the way in which, the authors offer correctives to the shallow myths and partial truths that pervade a lot well known therapy of the structure, from college textbooks to media money owed of today’s controversies, and provide strong insights into the Constitution’s precise meaning.
A lucid and fascinating consultant, The structure: An Introduction offers readers with the instruments to imagine seriously and independently approximately constitutional issuesa ability that's ever extra necessary to the ongoing flourishing of yank democracy.
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Extra info for The Constitution: An Introduction
Example text
Madison was the one who convinced other prominent leaders to press for and, eventually, attend the Philadelphia convention of 1787. He was instrumental in persuading Washington to come out of retirement at Mount Vernon and support the movement for a constitutional convention. Madison then played a central role in drafting the entirely new Constitution and persuading the convention to adopt it. It was his plan—the “Virginia Plan,” introduced by Governor Edmund Randolph—that quickly provided the framework for the convention’s deliberations over a new constitution.
That is a simple, straightforward goal, but also a surprisingly difficult one to achieve. Most books on the American Constitution, it seems, tend to fall into one of two unsatisfactory categories. There exist a fair number of sophisticated, massive scholarly tomes on the Constitution, its interpretation, or the history of the Supreme Court. This is not one of them. There are also plenty of short, near-cartoonish, slapdash “popular” treatments of the Constitution. This is not one of those either.
The Confederation Congress was practically powerless to change things. It could not act to amend the Articles unless every state legislature agreed—the Articles themselves required that any changes be adopted unanimously (Article XIII)—and there was always some state that disagreed, out of self-interest. In short, now that the mutual-defense treaty seemed disposable, the promises of a “firm league of friendship” were being broken on every side. And so it was that the Constitution of the United States came to be born out of a sense of urgency and desperation.