BiblioVault - Books about Constitutional law

Insurgencies

Constituent Power and the Modern State

Antonio Negri

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

New Edition

In the ten years since the initial publication of Insurgencies, Antonio Negri's reputation as one of the world's foremost political philosophers has grown dramatically. An invigorating appraisal of revolutionary thought, Insurgencies is both the precursor to and the historical basis for Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's masterwork, Empire.

At the center of this book is the conflict between "constituent power," the democratic force of revolutionary innovation, and "constituted power," the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. This conflict, Negri argues, defines the drama of modern rebellions. Now with a foreword by Michael Hardt, Insurgencies leads to a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a democratic future.

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Insurgencies

Constituent Power And The Modern State

Antonio Negri

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

A modern revolutionary's fresh approach to radical thought. At a time when political paradigms are collapsing, and the death of Marxism and the Left is proclaimed, Insurgencies offers an intellectually invigorating and historically wide-ranging appraisal of the real legacy and promise of revolutionary thought and practice. At the center of this book is the conflict between "constituent power," the democratic force of revolutionary innovation, and "constituted power," the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. This conflict, Antonio Negri argues, defines the drama of modern rebellions, from Machiavelli's Florence and Harrington's England to the American, French, and Russian revolutions. Insurgencies leads to a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a radically democratic future. After living in exile in France for nearly fourteen years, Antonio Negri is currently serving a jail sentence in Italy, his home country, for his political activism in the 1970s. His conviction, which was based on the substance of his writings, led Michel Foucault to ask, "Isn't he in prison simply for being an intellectual?" Negri's works in English include The Savage Anomaly (1991) and, with Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus (1994). Maurizia Boscagli is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Interpreting Law and Literature

A Hermeneutic Reader

Sanford Levinson and Steven Mailloux

Northwestern University Press, 1988

From the Preface:

"Contemporary theory has usefully analyzed how alternative modes of interpretation produce different meanings, how reading itself is constituted by the variable perspectives of readers, and how these perspectives are in turn defined by prejudices, ideologies, interests, and so forth. Some theorists gave argued persuasively that textual meaning, in literature and in literary interpretation, is structured by repression and forgetting, by what the literary or critical text does not say as much as by what it does. All these claims are directly relevant to legal hermeneutics, and thus it is no surprise that legal theorists have recently been turning to literary theory for potential insight into the interpretation of law. This collection of essays is designed to represent the especially rich interactive that has taken place between legal and literary hermeneutics during the past ten years."

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Interpreting State Constitutions

A Jurisprudence of Function in a Federal System

James A. Gardner

University of Chicago Press, 2005

Interpreting State Constitutions examines and proposes a solution to a problem central to contemporary debates over the enforcement of civil liberties: how courts, government officials, and lawyers should go about interpreting the constitutions of the American states.

With the Supreme Court's retreat from the aggressive protection of individual rights, state courts have begun to interpret state constitutions to provide broader protection of liberties. This development has reversed the polarity of constitutional politics, as liberals advocate unimpeded state power while conservatives lobby for state subordination to a constitutional law controlled centrally by the Supreme Court.

James A. Gardner here lays out the first fully developed theory of subnational constitutional interpretation. He argues that states are integral components of a national system of overlapping and mutually checking authority and that the purpose of this system is to protect liberty and defend against federal domination. The resulting account provides valuable prescriptive advice to state courts, showing them how to fulfill their responsibilities to the federal system in a way that strengthens American constitutional discourse.

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