У даному виданні подано широку інформацію про спільні проблеми, що стоять перед Конституційним Судом України та Верховним Судом США щодо реалізації принципу верховенства Конституції у кожній з цих держав.

В книге на основе большого, малоизвестного нашему читателю фактического материала даются портреты сорока президентов США, рассказывается о наиболее важных событиях их жизни, об их отношениях со средствами массовой информации (периодической печатью, а позднее и радио и телевидением). Рассчитана на массового читателя.

The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law offers an unusually nuanced analysis of the most pressing gay rights issues. Does antigay discrimination violate the Constitution? Is there any sound moral objection to homosexual conduct? Are such objections the moral and constitutional equivalent of racism? Must state laws recognizing same-sex unions be given effect in other states? Should courts take account of popular resistance to gay equality? Koppelman sheds new light on all these questions. Sure to upset purists on either side of the debate, Koppelman's book criticizes the legal arguments advanced both for and against gay rights. Just as important, it places these arguments in broader moral and social contexts, offering original, pragmatic, and workable legal solutions.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IS CONSIDERED A MAJOR THREAT TO privacy because it enables pervasive surveillance, massive databases, and lightning- speed distribution of information across the globe. In fact, privacy has been one of the most enduring social issues associated with digital electronic information technologies. A fi xture in public discourse at least since the 1960s, when the dominant concern was massive databases of government and other large institutions housed in large stand- alone computers, concerns have multiplied in type and extent as radical transformations of the technology have yielded the remarkable range of present- day systems, including distributed networking; the World Wide Web; mobile devices; video, audio, and biometric surveillance; global positioning; ubiquitous computing; social networks; sensor networks; databases of compiled information; data mining; and more. Associated with each of these developments is a set of worries about privacy.

Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades. In American Gulag, prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions. Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be read by all Americans. It is a book that will change the way we see our country. American Gulag takes us inside prisons such as the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the Corrections Corporation of America's Houston Processing Center, and county jails around the country that profit from contracts to hold INS prisoners. It contains disturbing in-depth profiles of detainees, including Emmy Kutesa, a defector from the Ugandan army who was tortured and then escaped to the United States, where he was imprisoned in Queens, and then undertook a hunger strike in protest. To provide a framework for understanding stories like these, Dow gives a brief history of immigration laws and practices in the United States--including the repercussions of September 11 and present-day policies. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority. American Gulag exposes the full story of a cruel prison system that is operating today with an astonishing lack of accountability.

In the 225 years since the United States Constitution was first drafted, no single book has addressed the key questions of what constitutions are designed to do, how they are structured, and why they matter. In From Words to Worlds, constitutional scholar Beau Breslin corrects this glaring oversight, singling out the essential functions that a modern, written constitution must incorporate in order to serve as a nation's fundamental law. Breslin lays out and explains the basic functions of a modern constitution -- including creating a new citizenry, structuring the institutions of government, regulating conflict between layers and branches of government, and limiting the power of the sovereign. He also moves into the esoteric, discussing the theoretical concepts behind the fundamentals of written constitutions and examining in-depth some of the most important constitutional charters from around the world. In assaying how states put the structural ideas into practice, Breslin asks probing questions about why -- and if -- constitutions matter. His answer is a resounding yes. Solidly argued and engagingly written, this comparative study in constitutional thought demonstrates clearly the key components that a state's foundational document must address. In doing so, Breslin draws a critically important distinction between constitutional texts and constitutional practice.

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities (food, security, and bare essentials) because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism. Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency.

This entertaining read is about the word "fuck", the law, and the taboo. Whether you shout it out in the street or whisper it in the bedroom, deliberately plan a protest, or spontaneously blurt it out, if you say "fuck," someone wants to silence you, either with a dirty look across the room or by making a rule that you cannot say the word. When it's the government trying to cleanse your language, though, you should worry. Words are ideas. If the government controls the words we use, it can control what we think. To protect this liberty, we must first understand why the law's treatment of "fuck" puts that freedom at risk. This book examines the law surrounding the word and reveals both inconsistencies in its treatment and tension with other identifiable legal rights that the law simply doesn't answer. The power of taboo provides the framework to understand these uncertainties. It also explains why attempts to curtail the use of "fuck" through law are doomed to fail. Fundamentally, it persists because it is taboo; not in spite of it.

In Our Children, Their Children, a prominent team of researchers argues that a second-rate and increasingly punitive juvenile justice system is allowed to persist because most people believe it is designed for children in other ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While public opinion, laws, and social policies that convey distinctions between "our children" and "their children" may seem to conflict with the American ideal of blind justice, they are hardly at odds with patterns of group differentiation and inequality that have characterized much of American history. Our Children, Their Children provides a state-of-the-science examination of racial and ethnic disparities in the American juvenile justice system. Here, contributors document the precise magnitude of these disparities, seek to determine their causes, and propose potential solutions. In addition to race and ethnicity, contributors also look at the effects on juvenile justice of suburban sprawl, the impact of family and neighborhood, bias in postarrest decisions, and mental health issues. Assessing the implications of these differences for public policy initiatives and legal reforms, this volume is the first critical summary of what is known and unknown in this important area of social research.

This book does have a few commendable features. It is written in laymen's language, you don't have to be a constitutional law scholar like David A. Strauss to comprehend the arguments. And it's short. Won't take more than a couple of hours to read. But as a critique of the "originalist" constitutional doctrine, it is hit and miss.

There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct. The past provides many instances where the law refused to see a human being when it should have. . . . The challenge for future generations will be to define what is most essentially human. The extension of the Common Benefits Clause to acknowledge [same-sex couples] as Vermonters who seek nothing more, nor less, than legal protection and security for their avowed commitment to an intimate and lasting human relationship is simply, when all is said and done, a recognition of our common humanity.

Lopez focuses on two related events in 1960s California politics that prompted the brown-power movement that fuels contemporary Latino consciousness. When Mexican American high-school students in East Los Angeles launched a protest against the horrid conditions in their schools, school officials and local politicians sought to punish a few students to discourage spreading discord. About the same time, a group of Mexican protestors were charged with conspiracy involving fires set during a speech by then governor Ronald Reagan at a Los Angeles hotel. Lopez argues that the conspiracy charge, the backlash against the Mexican students, and subsequent trials challenging the status quo of California race relations also challenged the until-then popular notion among Mexicans that they were white and sparked the brown-race consciousness. Lopez explores the intersection of the law and racial politics that points out the glaring racism extant in practices of the time. This is a penetrating look at racial politics and evolving race consciousness among Latinos. Vernon Ford Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The path from green card to U.S. citizenship can be a winding one -- and running into bureaucratic hassles is inevitable. But with Becoming a U.S. Citizen, you can shave years off the time it takes to become a citizen.

What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of the foundations of human rights. First, On Human Rights traces the idea of a natural right from its origin in the late Middle Ages, when the rights were seen as deriving from natural laws, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the original theological background was progressively dropped and 'natural law' emptied of most of its original meaning. By the end of the Enlightenment, the term "human rights" (droits de l'homme) appeared, marking the purge of the theological background. But the Enlightenment, in putting nothing in its place, left us with an unsatisfactory, incomplete idea of a human right. Griffin shows how the language of human rights has become debased. There are scarcely any accepted criteria, either in the academic or the public sphere, for correct use of the term. He takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare rights--for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights--an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world. We can't do without the idea of human rights, and we need to get clear about it. It is our job now--the job of this book--to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Who should have the last word on fundamental policy issues? This book analyzes the rise of two contenders - the people, through direct democracy, and the courts. Introduced in the U.S. during the Progressive Era and now available in nearly half the states, direct democracy has surged in recent decades. Through ballot measures, voters have slashed taxes, mandated government spending, imposed term limits on elected officials, enacted campaign finance reform, barred affirmative action, banned same-sex marriage, and adopted many other controversial laws. In several states, citizens now bypass legislatures to make the most important policy decisions. However, the "people's rule" is not absolute. This book demonstrates that courts have used an expanding power of judicial review to invalidate citizen-enacted laws at remarkably high rates. The resulting conflict between the people and the courts threatens to produce a popular backlash against judges and raises profound questions about the proper scope of popular sovereignty and judicial power in a constitutional system.

Americans cannot live with judicial review, but they cannot live without it. There is something characteristically American about turning the most divisive political questions - like freedom of religion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and abortion - into legal questions with the hope that courts can answer them. In Judicial Review in an Age of Moral Pluralism Ronald C. Den Otter addresses how judicial review can be improved to strike the appropriate balance between legislative and judicial power under conditions of moral pluralism. His defense of judicial review is predicated on the imperative of ensuring that the reasons that the state offers on behalf of its most important laws are consistent with the freedom and equality of all persons. Den Otter ties this defense to a theory of constitutional adjudication based on John Rawls's idea of public reason and argues that a law that is not sufficiently publicly justified is unconstitutional, thus addressing when courts should invalidate laws and when they should uphold them even in the midst of reasonable disagreement about the correct outcome in particular constitutional controversies.

This book gathers, synthesizes and analyzes case law in a variety of substantive contexts, including public employment, prison administration, and government benefits. It places current case law into historical context, serving as a reference guide for students, practitioners, judges and scholars interested in procedural due process. The author addresses the central requirements of notice and the opportunity to be heard as well as the day in court ideal. It also examines the protection due process affords against litigation in a distant forum with which the defendant has no connection.

Vol. 1. - 547 p.

Ця книжка подає перший український переклад Декларації Незалежності Сполучених Штатів Америки, Конституцій США з двадцять двома доповненнями та Геттізбурської промови президена Лінкольна - документів, що відіграли величезну роль у розвитку конституційної демократії у всьому світі.