A distinguished international team of legal theorists examine the issue of constitutionalism and pose such foundational questions as: Why have a constitution? How do we know what the constitution of a country really is? How should a constitution be interpreted? The volume will be of particular importance to those in philosophy, law, political science and international relations interested in whether and what kinds of constitutions should be adopted in countries without them, and involved in debates about constitutional interpretation.

Bain Attwood's Rights for Aborigines is an important addition to the evolving canon on the interrelationships between white and indigenous Australians. His project provides timely scholarship on the discontinuities of the historical struggle of indigenous Australians to participate in a politically sanctioned, and mediated, liberal present. Attwood's approach is to select key case studies as 'representative' (p. xiv) of the development of indigenous engagement with white activists, and white ideas of justice, equality and fairness, in order to overcome colonial disadvantage. These case studies are ordered chronologically to provide clarity on the fractured discursive development of ideas like 'aboriginality' within a coherent temporal framework. They are significant within themselves, focusing on key historical struggles, for example, Coranderrk in the 1870s, the 1938 Day of Mourning, the 1967 referendum, and Tent Embassy in 1972, and will provide that most useful of references — a thorough account of a series of interconnected events with an intelligent analysis — for scholars of history, political science and law. The stand out, in terms of investigating closely the complex ways in which ideas of racial equality changed for both white and indigenous Australians as a result of their close working relationships, was the chapter on the Wave Hill strike. The careful reading of the narratives of engagement set up by CPA writer Frank Hardy with the Gurindji, in particular Vincent Lingiari, allows Attwood to investigate the individualised elements of political and psychological change, while still showing how probably the most politically significant discourse of recent times, land rights; emerged.

In photographs Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln both look the part of the respectable Victorian gentleman. But they were almost diametrically opposed in their attitude toward what was called at the time the social question. Lincoln happily represented railroad corporations as a lawyer. As a politician he was a champion of free wage labor. Karl Marx, on the other hand, was a declared foe of capitalism who insisted that wage labor was in fact wage slavery, since the worker was compelled by economic necessity to sell his defi ning human attribute—his labor power—because if he did not, his family would soon face hunger and homelessness.

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.

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 is an introductory textbook on sexual politics and an original contribution to the reformulation of social and political theory. In a discussion of, among other issues, psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminist theories, the structure of gender relations, and working class feminism, the author has produced a work of synthesis and scholarship which should be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, politics, women's studies and to anyone interested in the field of sexual politics.

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.

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.

According to the introduction, every nation has a constitution or a set of documents that serves as one. In each of these, the fundamental "rules" of the country--the defining principals of its government--are laid out in one form or another. It would be difficult to make any other generalizations concerning these documents and the information they contain. Each is unique in itself, while performing a similar function. The very nature of the material makes it challenging for a casual or inexperienced researcher to make comparisons. This set, in a sense, deconstructs these constitutions in a straightforward style. Entries for 194 countries are arranged A-Z. The articles for each country are signed and in many cases are written by scholars who specialize in the country they are writing about. The structure of each article follows a pattern designed to make it easy to compare information from one country to another. Each begins with a small collection of information about the country: name, capital, languages spoken, ethnic composition, type of government, and date of constitution, among others. A brief overview of the country is followed by standard subsections: "Constitutional History," "Form and Impact of the Constitution," "Basic Organizational Structure," "Leading Constitutional Principles," "Constitutional Bodies," and so on. Articles range from 4 to 13 pages in length, and each concludes with links to the text of the constitution in its original language (and, if needed, an English translation) and secondary sources for further reading. At the end of volume 3 are several useful appendixes. One gives the same kind of constitutional information for the European Union, and the second provides a list and description of "Special Territories" such as Antarctica, the Cook Islands, Guam, and the Isle of Man. The third is a glossary of terms.

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.

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.

Liberal theories have long insisted that cultural diversity in democratic societies can be accommodated through classical liberal tools, in particular through individual rights, and they have often rejected the claims of cultural minorities for group rights as illiberal. Group Rights as Human Rights argues that such a rejection is misguided. Based on a thorough analysis of the concept of group rights, it proposes to overcome the dominant dichotomy between "individual" human rights and "collective" group rights by recognizing that group rights also serve individual interests. It also challenges the claim that group rights, so understood, conflict with the liberal principle of neutrality; on the contrary, these rights help realize the neutrality ideal as they counter cultural biases that exist in Western states. Group rights deserve to be classified as human rights because they respond to fundamental, and morally important, human interests. Reading the theories of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor as complementary rather than opposed, Group Rights as Human Rights sees group rights as anchored both in the value of cultural belonging for the development of individual autonomy and in each person’s need for a recognition of her identity. This double foundation has important consequences for the scope of group rights: it highlights their potential not only in dealing with national minorities but also with immigrant groups; and it allows to determine how far such rights should also benefit illiberal groups. Participation, not intervention, should here be the guiding principle if group rights are to realize the liberal promise.

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.

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This volume introduces law students to the international legal instruments and case law governing the substantive and procedural dimensions of international human rights and humanitarian law, including economic, social, and cultural rights. It also discusses the history and organizational structure of human rights and humanitarian law enforcement mechanisms. Relevant to U.S. audiences, a chapter is devoted to the issues surrounding the incorporation of international law into U.S. law, including principles of constitutional and statutory interpretation, conflict rules, and the self-execution doctrine. Questions & Comments sections provide critical analyses of issues raised in the materials.

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.