This book explores the US Supreme Court's impact on the constitutional development of the federal government from the founding era forward. The author's research is based on an original database of several hundred landmark decisions compiled from constitutional law casebooks and treatises published between 1822 and 2010. By rigorously and systematically interpreting these decisions, he determines the extent to which the court advanced and consolidated national governing authority. The result is a portrait of how the high court, regardless of constitutional issue and ideology, persistently expanded the reach and scope of the federal government.

George Mason (1725-92) is often omitted from the small circle of founding fathers celebrated today, but in his service to America he was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "of the first order of greatness." Jeff Broadwater provides a comprehensive account of Mason's life at the center of the momentous events of eighteenth-century America. Mason played a key role in the Stamp Act Crisis, the American Revolution, and the drafting of Virginia's first state constitution. He is perhaps best known as author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a document often hailed as the model for the Bill of Rights. As a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Mason influenced the emerging Constitution on point after point. Yet when he was rebuffed in his efforts to add a bill of rights and concluded the document did too little to protect the interests of the South, he refused to sign the final draft. Broadwater argues that Mason's recalcitrance was not the act of an isolated dissenter; rather, it emerged from the ideology of the American Revolution. Mason's concerns about the abuse of political power, Broadwater shows, went to the essence of the American experience.

Vol. 1-14 include the proceedings of the Oregon Bar Association, previously issued separately as: Proceedings of the Oregon Bar Association at its ... annual meeting.

Dr. Frédéric Jenny is the Renaissance man of competition policy. As an economist, scholar, judge and enforcer, he has helped transform the landscape of global competition enforcement. In the first volume of this Liber Amicorum, distinguished members of both Bar and Bench, as well as academics from around the world, come together to bear testimony to his international achievements. This collection of 21 articles celebrates Dr. Jenny's career thus far, and also explores other timely and topical areas of competition law and policy.

A collection of essays that examines the use and abuse of eminent domain across the world.

In the past few decades, economic analysis of law has been challenged by a growing body of experimental and empirical studies that attest to prevalent and systematic deviations from the assumptions of economic rationality. While the findings on bounded rationality and heuristics and biases were initially perceived as antithetical to standard economic and legal-economic analysis, over time they have been largely integrated into mainstream economic analysis, including economic analysis of law. Moreover, the impact of behavioral insights has long since transcended purely economic analysis of law: in recent years, the behavioral movement has become one of the most influential developments in legal scholarship in general. Behavioral Law and Economics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the field. Eyal Zamir and Doron Teichman survey the entire body of psychological research that lies at the basis of behavioral analysis of law, and critically evaluate the core methodological questions of this area of research. Following this, the book discusses the fundamental normative questions stemming from the psychological findings on bounded rationality, and explores their implications for setting the law's goals and designing the means to attain them. The book then provides a systematic and critical examination of the contributions of behavioral studies to all major fields of law including: property, contracts, consumer protection, torts, corporate, securities regulation, antitrust, administrative, constitutional, international, criminal, and evidence law, as well as to the behavior of key players in the legal arena: litigants and judicial decision-makers.

In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein provides a lively, scholarly account of how the Obama administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. Lawless documents how President Barack Obama has presided over one constitutional debacle after another—Obamacare; unauthorized wars in the Middle East; attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights; and many more. Violating his own promises to respect the Constitution’s separation of powers, Obama brazenly ignores Congress when it won’t rubber-stamp his initiatives. “We can’t wait,” he intones when amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memo legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, as if Congress doing its job as a coequal branch of government somehow permits the president to rule like a dictator, free from the Constitution’s checks and balances. President Obama has also presided over the bold and rampant lawlessness of his underlings. Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here.” When confronted with allegations that his administration’s actions are illegal, Obama responds, “So sue me.” Lawless shows how President Obama has betrayed not only the Constitution but also his own stated principles. In the process, he has done serious and potentially permanent damage to our constitutional system. As America swings into election season, it will have to grapple with finding a president who can repair Obama’s lawless legacy.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021: POLITICS BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL "A must-read for anyone interested in the Supreme Court."—MIKE LEE, Republican senator from Utah Politics have always intruded on Supreme Court appointments. But although the Framers would recognize the way justices are nominated and confirmed today, something is different. Why have appointments to the high court become one of the most explosive features of our system of government? As Ilya Shapiro makes clear in Supreme Disorder, this problem is part of a larger phenomenon. As government has grown, its laws reaching even further into our lives, the courts that interpret those laws have become enormously powerful. If we fight over each new appointment as though everything were at stake, it’s because it is. When decades of constitutional corruption have left us subject to an all-powerful tribunal, passions are sure to flare on the infrequent occasions when the political system has an opportunity to shape it. And so we find the process of judicial appointments verging on dysfunction. Shapiro weighs the many proposals for reform, from the modest (term limits) to the radical (court-packing), but shows that there can be no quick fix for a judicial system suffering a crisis of legitimacy. And in the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it maintains, or rebalances, our constitutional order.

This book reads Jean-Jacques Rousseau with a view toward deepening our understanding of many political issues alive today, including the place of women in society, the viability of traditional family structures, the role of religion and religious freedom in nations that are becoming ever more secular, and the proper conduct of American constitutional government. Rousseau has been among the most influential modern philosophers, and among the most misunderstood. The first great philosophic critic of the Enlightenment, he sought to revive political philosophy as it was practiced by Plato, and to make it useful in the modern world. His understanding of politics rests on deep and often prescient reflections about the nature of the human soul and the relationship between our animal origins and the achievements of civilization. This book demonstrates that the implications Rousseau drew from those reflections continue to deserve serious attention.

Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular—and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense—The Case against Education points the way.