In this groundbreaking analysis of Supreme Court decision-making, Andrew Coan explains how judicial caseload shapes the course of American constitutional law and the role of the Court in American society.
Compared with the vast machinery surrounding Congress and the president, the Supreme Court is a tiny institution that can resolve only a small fraction of the constitutional issues that arise in any given year. Rationing the Constitution shows that this simple yet frequently ignored fact is essential to understanding how the Supreme Court makes constitutional law.
Due to the structural organization of the judiciary and certain widely shared professional norms, the capacity of the Supreme Court to review lower-court decisions is severely limited. From this fact, Andrew Coan develops a novel and arresting theory of Supreme Court decision-making. In deciding cases, the Court must not invite more litigation than it can handle. On many of the most important constitutional questions—touching on federalism, the separation of powers, and individual rights—this constraint creates a strong pressure to adopt hard-edged categorical rules, or defer to the political process, or both.
The implications for U.S. constitutional law are profound. Lawyers, academics, and social activists pursuing social reform through the courts must consider whether their goals can be accomplished within the constraints of judicial capacity. Often the answer will be no. The limits of judicial capacity also substantially constrain the Court’s much touted—and frequently lamented—power to overrule democratic majorities. As Rationing the Constitution demonstrates, the Supreme Court is David, not Goliath.
Much of the content of Judges can be understood only when read together with other parts of the Hebrew Bible. Narratives in Judges comment, criticize, and reinterpret other texts from across what became the canon, often by troubling gender, disrupting stereotypical binaries, and creating a kind of gender chaos. This volume brings together gender criticism and intertextuality, methods that logically align with intersectional lenses, to draw attention to how race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, sex, and sexuality all play a role in how one is gendered in the book of Judges. Contributors Elizabeth H. P. Backfish, Shelley L. Birdsong, Zev Farber, Serge Frolov, Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher, Susan E. Haddox, Hyun Chul Paul Kim, Richard D. Nelson, Pamela J. W. Nourse, Tammi J. Schneider, Joy A. Schroeder, Soo Kim Sweeney, Rannfrid I. Lasine Thelle, J. Cornelis de Vos, Jennifer J. Williams, and Gregory T. K. Wong provide substantial new and significant contributions to the study of gender, the book of Judges, and biblical hermeneutics in general. This volume illustrates why biblical scholars and students need to take the intersectional identities of characters and their intertextual environments seriously.
The old judge enjoyed swapping tales and sharing company with other lawyers, politicians, and family members. A true aristocrat of the Old South, Garnett Andrews (1798–1873) so enjoyed hearing and telling good yarns that he decided late in his life to preserve them for posterity. The judge wrote down a collection of his stories, including tales of men with whom he had worked—and some whom he had worked against—and in 1870, about three years before he died, he had his booklet printed and circulated among friends. He titled it Reminiscences of an Old Georgia Lawyer.
This new volume reprises Andrews’s work, and features a new introduction by S. Kittrell Rushing. In recounting a lawyer’s life from the frontier period through the Civil War and into the Reconstruction era, Andrews’s recollections provide rare and fascinating details, particularly about pre–Civil War Georgia, the state of the judiciary in the early national period—about which little has been written—and the larger political and social milieu of antebellum and postbellum America. This is an eclectic mixture of tall tales, humorous anecdotes, and keen observations about southern society and the practice of law.
In his introduction, Rushing places Andrews’s writings in a broad context. He addresses Andrews’s racial views head on, confronting and probing the racism, sexism, and classism of Andrews and his times. In addition, Rushing provides biographical and genealogical information about the judge and his family, including his daughter, the noted diarist and novelist Eliza Frances Andrews. This volume also includes other pieces by Andrews, among them letters, speeches, and his acceptance of the 1855 gubernatorial nomination.
Highly readable and lively, Reminiscence of an Old Georgia Lawyer will enlighten and entertain both scholars and general readers interested in the history of Georgia, the Old South, and American legal history.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press