The Washington State Constitution


Book Description

The Washington State Constitution provides an outstanding constitutional and historical account of the state's governing charter. In addition to an overview of Washington's constitutional history that focuses on the document's 19th century populist roots, it provides an in-depth, section-by-section analysis of the entire constitution, detailing the many significant changes made since its initial drafting. This treatment, along with a table of cases, index, and bibliography, provides an unsurpassed reference guide for lawyers, judges, scholars, and members of the general public. The second edition of The Washington State Constitution has been significantly expanded to detail the impact of the late nineteenth century Populist movement on both the structure and content of Washington's 1889 constitution. The book includes current and important developments in the theory of state constitutional interpretation in Washington State, describes the significant expansion, over the past decade, in the Washington Supreme Court's independent reliance on the state's constitution rather than the federal constitution in many constitutional doctrines, particularly those related to individual rights. The title also includes up-to-date analysis of significant developments in a number of areas, including the rights of criminal defendants; personal freedoms of speech, religion and privacy; powers and constraints on the state legislature and the governor; the initiative, referendum and recall; and the application of Washington's unique public education clause. The Oxford Commentaries on the State Constitutions of the United States is an important series that reflects a renewed international interest in constitutional history and provides expert insight into each of the 50 state constitutions. Each volume in this innovative series contains a historical overview of the state's constitutional development, a section-by-section analysis of its current constitution, and a comprehensive guide to further research. Under the expert editorship of Professor G. Alan Tarr, Director of the Center on State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers University, this series provides essential reference tools for understanding state constitutional law. Books in the series can be purchased individually or as part of a complete set, giving readers unmatched access to these important political documents.




Ways of Necessity


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Prestatehood Legal Materials


Book Description

Explore the controversial legal history of the formation of the United States Prestatehood Legal Materials is your one-stop guide to the history and development of law in the U.S. and the change from territory to statehood. Unprecedented in its coverage of territorial government, this book identifies a wide range of available resources from each state to reveal the underlying legal principles that helped form the United States. In this unique publication, a state expert compiles each chapter using his or her own style, culminating in a diverse sourcebook that is interesting as well as informative. In Prestatehood Legal Materials, you will find bibliographies, references, and discussion on a varied list of source materials, including: state codes drafted by Congress county, state, and national archives journals and digests state and federal reports, citations, surveys, and studies books, manuscripts, papers, speeches, and theses town and city records and documents Web sites to help your search for more information and more Prestatehood Legal Materials provides you with brief overviews of state histories from colonization to acceptance into the United States. In this book, you will see how foreign countries controlled the laws of these territories and how these states eventually broke away to govern themselves. The text also covers the legal issues with Native Americans, inter-state and the Mexico and Canadian borders, and the development of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state government. This guide focuses on materials that are readily available to historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and researchers. Resources that assist in locating not-so-easily accessible materials are also covered. Special sections focus on the legal resources of colonial New York City and Washington, DC—which is still technically in its prestatehood stage. Due to the enormity of this project, the editor of Prestatehood Legal Materials created a Web page where updates, corrections, additions and more will be posted.




George Washington, Nationalist


Book Description

George Washington was the unanimous choice of his fellow founders for president, and he is remembered to this day as an exceptional leader, but how exactly did this manifest itself during his lifetime? In George Washington, Nationalist, acclaimed author Edward J. Larson reveals the fascinating backstory of Washington’s leadership in the political, legal, and economic consolidation of the new nation, spotlighting his crucial role in forming a more perfect union. The years following the American Revolution were a critical period in American history, when the newly independent states teetered toward disunion under the Articles of Confederation. Looking at a selection of Washington’s most pivotal acts—including conferring with like-minded nationalists, establishing navigational rights on the Potomac, and quelling the near uprising of unpaid revolutionary troops against the Confederation Congress—Larson shows Washington’s central role in the drive for reform leading up to the Constitutional Convention. His leadership at that historic convention, followed by his mostly behind-the-scenes efforts in the ratification process and the first federal election, and culminating in his inauguration as president, complete the picture of Washington as the nation’s first citizen. This important and deeply researched book brings Washington’s unique gift for leadership to life for modern readers, offering a timely addition to the growing body of literature on the Constitution, presidential leadership, executive power, and state-federal relations. Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Lectures Preparation of this volume has been supported by The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon and by a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Lewis E. Lehrman.







Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places


Book Description

Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the federal Constitution. Emily Zackin shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. Zackin looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism. Shedding much-needed light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.




Democratic Beginnings


Book Description

State constitutions are blueprints for government institutions, declarations of collective identity, statements of principle, values, and goals. It naturally follows, and this book demonstrates, that the founding documents and the conventions that produced them reflect the emerging dynamics of American democracy in the nineteenth century. Nowhere is this more clear, Amy Bridges tells us in Democratic Beginnings, than in the American West. A close study of the constitutional conventions that founded eleven Western states, and of the constitutions they wrote, Democratic Beginnings traces the arc of Western development. Spanning the sixty years from California's constitution of 1850 to those of Arizona and New Mexico in 1910—and including Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming—Bridges shows how delegates to these states' constitutional conventions, pragmatically and creatively devised law and policy for the unprecedented challenges they faced. Far from the "island communities" of conventional 19th-century American history, these delegates, and the territories they represented, were thoroughly engaged in the central issues of their times, at the local, regional, and national levels--mining and agriculture, labor law and corporate responsibilities, water rights and government obligations, education and judicial practice. Theirs was not the Founders' constitutional convention. With very different tasks, delegates more representative of the population, and the experience of living in a democratic republic that their forebears lacked, the Western delegates found unparalleled opportunities at the conventions for popular input into law and public policy. What they did with these opportunities, and how these in turn shaped the emerging American West, is the story Democratic Beginnings tells.




General Election Laws


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