Author : Mark Carlton Miller
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 40,10 MB
Release : 2002-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781572331655
The High Priests of American Politics offers an incisive look at how and why lawyers dominate legislatures in the United States and what impact, for better or worse, this dominance has on the broader governmental system.
Author : Michael Collins Piper
Publisher : Stranger Journalism
Page : 147 pages
File Size : 32,19 MB
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 0974548413
The Secret History of How America's "Neo-Conservative" Trotskyites came to power and Orchestrated the war against Iraq as the First Step in their drive for Global Empire. Written by the author of the #1 Banned Book in America: "Final Judgement".
Author : Richard Hofstadter
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 34,33 MB
Release : 2008-06-10
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0307388441
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.
Author : Kimberly K. Smith
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 46,12 MB
Release : 2024-04-11
Category : Law
ISBN : 0700636390
Why did it take so long for American law schools to start teaching about climate change? Although most environmental law professors were aware of climate change by 1990, it took nearly fifteen years for them to incorporate the topic into their curriculum. In her innovative new work, Kimberly K. Smith explores how American environmental law professors have addressed climate change, identifying the barriers they faced, how they overcame them, and how they created “climate law” as a domain of legal specialization. Making Climate Lawyers explores the history of why American law schools were resistant to teaching about climate change and how that changed over the course of a forty-year period, resulting in law schools across the country incorporating climate change into their curricula, with many even establishing centers on the environment. Smith challenges dominant explanations of why the United States was slow to develop climate policy: it wasn’t just political opposition or short-sightedness. Creating climate legal professionals required changing the fundamentals of legal education. Based on dozens of interviews with faculty and students, Making Climate Lawyers fills a gap in the literature on the intellectual history of climate change, most of which focuses on the history of climate science. Smith focuses instead on how the climate problem fits (or doesn’t fit) into the structure of American law. She uses this story as a lens through which to understand both the transformation of legal education since the 1980s and the nature of climate change as a policy problem.
Author : Mark C. Miller
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 445 pages
File Size : 27,84 MB
Release : 2018-09-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0429962150
Judicial Politics in the United States examines the role of courts as policymaking institutions and their interactions with the other branches of government and other political actors in the U.S. political system. Not only does this book cover the nuts and bolts of the functions, structures and processes of our courts and legal system, it goes beyond other judicial process books by exploring how the courts interact with executives, legislatures, and state and federal bureaucracies. It also includes a chapter devoted to the courts' interactions with interest groups, the media, and general public opinion and a chapter that looks at how American courts and judges interact with other judiciaries around the world. Judicial Politics in the United States balances coverage of judicial processes with discussions of the courts' interactions with our larger political universe, making it an essential text for students of judicial politics.
Author : Marjorie Heins
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 35,19 MB
Release : 2013-02-04
Category : Law
ISBN : 0814790518
In the early 1950s, New York City’s teachers and professors became the targets of massive investigations into their political beliefs and associations. Those who refused to cooperate in the questioning were fired. Some had undoubtedly been communists, and the Communist Party-USA certainly made its share of mistakes, but there was never evidence that the accused teachers had abused their trust. Some were among the most brilliant, popular, and dedicated educators in the city. Priests of Our Democracy tells of the teachers and professors who resisted the witch hunt, those who collaborated, and those whose battles led to landmark Supreme Court decisions. It traces the political fortunes of academic freedom beginning in the late 19th century, both on campus and in the courts. Combining political and legal history with wrenching personal stories, the book details how the anti-communist excesses of the 1950s inspired the Supreme Court to recognize the vital role of teachers and professors in American democracy. The crushing of dissent in the 1950s impoverished political discourse in ways that are still being felt, and First Amendment academic freedom, a product of that period, is in peril today. In compelling terms, this book shows why the issue should matter to every American.
Author : John T Ishiyama
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 937 pages
File Size : 38,86 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1412969018
Offering full coverage of major subthemes and subfields within political science this reference handbook includes entries on topics from theory and methodology to international relations and institutions.
Author : Hans Blokland
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 34,54 MB
Release : 2016-04-22
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1317079574
The political discontent or malaise that typifies most modern democracies is mainly caused by the widely shared feeling that the political freedom of citizens to influence the development of their society and, related to this, their personal life, has become rather limited. We can only address this discontent when we rehabilitate politics, the deliberate, joint effort to give direction to society and to make the best of ourselves. In Pluralism, Democracy and Political Knowledge, Hans Blokland examines this challenge via a critical appraisal of the pluralist conception of politics and democracy. This conception was formulated by, above all, Robert A. Dahl, one of the most important political scholars and democratic theorists of the last half century. Taking his work as the point of reference, this book not only provides an illuminating history of political science, told via Dahl and his critics, it also offers a revealing analysis as to what progress we have made in our thinking on pluralism and democracy, and what progress we could make, given the epistemological constraints of the social sciences. Above and beyond this, the development and the problems of pluralism and democracy are explored in the context of the process of modernization. The author specifically discusses the extent to which individualization, differentiation and rationalization contribute to the current political malaise in those countries which adhere to a pluralist political system.
Author : Mark C. Miller
Publisher : Georgetown University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 19,64 MB
Release : 2004-08-23
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1589013646
The functioning of the U.S. government is a bit messier than Americans would like to think. The general understanding of policymaking has Congress making the laws, executive agencies implementing them, and the courts applying the laws as written—as long as those laws are constitutional. Making Policy, Making Law fundamentally challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that no dominant institution—or even a roughly consistent pattern of relationships—exists among the various players in the federal policymaking process. Instead, at different times and under various conditions, all branches play roles not only in making public policy, but in enforcing and legitimizing it as well. This is the first text that looks in depth at this complex interplay of all three branches. The common thread among these diverse patterns is an ongoing dialogue among roughly coequal actors in various branches and levels of government. Those interactions are driven by processes of conflict and persuasion distinctive to specific policy arenas as well as by the ideas, institutional realities, and interests of specific policy communities. Although complex, this fresh examination does not render the policymaking process incomprehensible; rather, it encourages scholars to look beyond the narrow study of individual institutions and reach across disciplinary boundaries to discover recurring patterns of interbranch dialogue that define (and refine) contemporary American policy. Making Policy, Making Law provides a combination of contemporary policy analysis, an interbranch perspective, and diverse methodological approaches that speak to a surprisingly overlooked gap in the literature dealing with the role of the courts in the American policymaking process. It will undoubtedly have significant impact on scholarship about national lawmaking, national politics, and constitutional law. For scholars and students in government and law—as well as for concerned citizenry—this book unravels the complicated interplay of governmental agencies and provides a heretofore in-depth look at how the U.S. government functions in reality.
Author : Nicholas Carnes
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 12,35 MB
Release : 2013-11-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 022608728X
Eight of the last twelve presidents were millionaires when they took office. Millionaires have a majority on the Supreme Court, and they also make up majorities in Congress, where a background in business or law is the norm and the average member has spent less than two percent of his or her adult life in a working-class job. Why is it that most politicians in America are so much better off than the people who elect them— and does the social class divide between citizens and their representatives matter? With White-Collar Government, Nicholas Carnes answers this question with a resounding—and disturbing—yes. Legislators’ socioeconomic backgrounds, he shows, have a profound impact on both how they view the issues and the choices they make in office. Scant representation from among the working class almost guarantees that the policymaking process will be skewed toward outcomes that favor the upper class. It matters that the wealthiest Americans set the tax rates for the wealthy, that white-collar professionals choose the minimum wage for blue-collar workers, and that people who have always had health insurance decide whether or not to help those without. And while there is no one cause for this crisis of representation, Carnes shows that the problem does not stem from a lack of qualified candidates from among the working class. The solution, he argues, must involve a variety of changes, from the equalization of campaign funding to a shift in the types of candidates the parties support. If we want a government for the people, we have to start working toward a government that is truly by the people. White-Collar Government challenges long-held notions about the causes of political inequality in the United States and speaks to enduring questions about representation and political accountability.
