Thomas B. McAffee

Inherent Rights, the Written Constitution, and Popular Sovereignty (eBook, PDF)

The Founders' Understanding

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

In recent decades the Ninth Amendment, a provision designed to clarify that the federal government was to be one of enumerated and limited powers, has been turned into an unenumerated rights clause that effectively grants unlimited power to the judiciary. Was this the intent of the framers of the Constitution? McAffee argues that the founders had a rather different set of priorities than ours, and that the goal of enforcing fundamental human rights was not why they drafted any of the first ten amendments. They did not intend to grant to the courts the power to generate fundamental rights, whether by reference to custom or history, reason or natural law, or societal values or consensus.

It has become increasingly popular to identify our constitutional order as an experiment in the protection of fundamental human rights and to forget that it is also an experiment in self-government. As fundamental as the founding generation believed basic rights to be, they saw popular authority to make decisions about government as being even more central to the project in which they were engaged. They supported natural law and rights, but they felt strongly that those rights did not bind the people or their government unless they were inserted in the written Constitution. They did not contemplate that there would be unwritten limitations on the powers granted to government.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Altersempfehlung: ab 7 Jahre
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Juli 2000
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780313001109
• Artikelnr.: 68527831

Autorenporträt

THOMAS B. MCAFFEE is Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas./e He has also taught at the Southern Illinois University Law School and at the University of Utah College of Law. He has published widely on topics related to American constitutional law, theory, and history.

Inhaltsangabe

The Modern Debate Over Inherent Constitutional Rights: What is at Stake?
State Constitutions in the Early American Republic: The Experiment With
Republican Government Constitutional Practice in the Confederation Period:
The Search for Effective Limits on Legislative Power The Decision at the
Philadelphia Convention: The Federal System as Bill of Rights The
Ratification-Era Debate Over the Omission of a Bill of Rights: The
Constitution as Fundamental Positive Law The Ninth Amendment and Modern
Constitutional Theory