Product Description
Professor Tribe’s highly regarded treatise on constitutional law is organized around issues, or constitutional functions, rather than being a sequential discussion of the text to the Constitution. The text is heavily footnoted with references to treatises, law review articles, the U.S. Code, and Supreme Court cases. This edition will be published in two self-contained volumes to be released sequentially. Volume I concentrates on the Constitution’s provisions for g… More >>
I could write a voluminous diatribe against this book, but I feel it would be meaningless, There are only two types of constitutional scholars in America.
1. Those that study the constitution and its original intent.
2. Those that write about it but rarely read it.
Unfortunately Laurence Tribe falls into the second category. He is unable to read and understand the original intent of the founding fathers because he is so intent upon his own revisionist interpretation. This is mainly because of his naturalistic interpretation of the law. If one would study the founding fathers and their beliefs it would be very hard to imagine this sort of indignation that Mr. Tribe befalls the USA.
Rating: 2 / 5
Emerson once wrote, “Habits and tradition have become a way of living secondhand, by the truths and ideas of other times, and a barrier against the soul’s insights.” Little evil minds even after a horrible civil war still yearn for the ORIGINAL INTENT of the US Constitution. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal….” as written by Thomas Jefferson met ONLY whitemen- NOT women, NOT Native American Indains, and certainly NOT blacks or any other minority group. Yes indeed, STRICTLY WHITEMEN, period. And that was the ORIGINAL INTENT.
Professor Tribe brings a fresh naturalistic interpretation to Constitution the same way the present modern day Court does-that the phrase, “all men are created equal” is, after all, “inclusive” via the processes of judicial review and amendments, etc. that the Constitution is a living document; its words express principles, not rigid rules in juxtaposition to the preclusive views of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Roger Brooke Taney, who characterized blacks as beings of inferior order, unfit to associate with the white race,that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect; and the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit. Appiah & Gates,Africana,1999. Justice Taney died before he could put the veto of law on the Proclamation of Emancipation.
Aristotle believed in a timocratic state- a state in which civic honor or political power was proportional to PROPERTY one owned. Would he have allowed comparable concept such as the “Second Amendment?” It is fallacious to do so. -SGW/SF
Rating: 5 / 5
Mr. Tribe unfortunately thinks that re-interpretation is a valid substitute for ammendment. Politically correct revisionist history notwithstanding, anything that is supposed to be authoritative (e.g. constitution) must by very definition be interpreted according to the intent of the author, not the desire of the reader. Otherwise, the liberties the document was written to protect are at perpetual risk of being interpreted away at the subjective whim of unaccountable judges. Mr. Tribe would do better to direct his efforts towards changing the actual clauses with which he disagrees rather than discredit the authority of the entire document by twisting and delegitimizing them. Even if one happens to hold the founding fathers in low esteem and reverence (as is fashionable these days to do), society is better served by making desired changes via ammending the text rather than ignoring it.
Rating: 1 / 5
Now that it is clear that Professor Tribe will never sit on the United States Supreme court, I can review this book the way we can now evaluate the Cold War–free from the threat of being dominated by it. So what was it that made me read this huge book back in its 1982 version? To see if I agreed or disagreed? Not really. It was more to see what my professors were talking about, as they reverently referred to “Larry” Tribe, and as they assigned various law review articles authored by Tribe to make certain points. In which I began to see a pattern. For instance, Tribe wrote that congressional action to limit Article III jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts would be a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the heads of victims of discrimination–and therefore not permissible as a political response to judicial activism. Because a little jurisdictional trim here, logically if played out to the nth degree, would mean a wholesale chain-sawing of earlier decisions relying on the previously un-trimmed scope of jursidiction. But that’s not legal reasoning. It’s more the “chicken little” school of politics, where each incremental gain is defended by invoking catastrophe if it is undone. Yet each gain was previously welcomed, so how could two steps of gain in the past now be illegal to go back to, by reversing the last decision at the margin of legal argument? That’s the basic alarmist dishonesty of this type of mock-inexorablness. And that’s what most of this treatise comes to. That, coupled with an equivalence game-theory argument of action-inaction, whereby the government (”state action”) is responsible not only for what it affirmatively does, but also for what it elects not to do, but arguably could have. We don’t spend 100% of our GNP on a government program to pay for Mr. X’s medical treatment? Well, then the state is really responsible for the effect of not paying for it. So Tribe has us coming and going. Do what he says, or pay the ever-upwardly ratcheting constitutional price. Which turns out to be infinite. Just like the founders intended, or maybe didn’t intend. No sweat, it’s all infintely provable with this kind of “reasoning.” So everyone is entitled to anything a court can be talked into giving, unless you’re not born yet, or unless you are trying to save up some money that the all-knowing government prefers to tax away, so that you, the inarticulate but hard-working schmuck with the metal stamping factory, can be subordinated to the screaming artists who need public funding (free of “censorship”) so they can make artwork no one will pay a market price for. Now, if this were so legal, wouldn’t it still hold true even in an undeveloped economy, say 13 colonies along a primitive shoreline? Or does it just “evolve” in synchronicity with the productive capacity of the minority group of wealth producers who are needed to pay for it? The positive part of Tribe is that he forces you to think by striking dismay in your heart as you read what he has planned for you, if you don’t. That, and his tome makes a good door-stopper, for the years of simple practice which follow law school. So my professors were wrong, but they were right.
Rating: 1 / 5
The author finds constitutional law in Supreme Court cases, not in the document entitled “the Constitution of the United States.” He also glosses over the fact that judicial review is nowhere found in the Constitution. Why shouldn’t there be “Congressional review?” That would make more sense, since the legislature, not the Supreme Court, is the voice of the soveriegn. Finally, the author approves of the Supreme Court overruling itself. The Supreme Court was not voted in, Congress was. Therefore, the enforcement of these Supreme Court opinions constitute not the voice of the people, but the voice of the tyrant. The legacy of this is seen today. Although all other powers are reserved to the States, we see the Supreme Court legislating from the bench against state laws that bar abortion. Another example of this legacy is the Ten Commandment case in Alabama. If Congress cannot make law respecting the establishment of religion, on what basis did that Federal District Court Judge rule for the removal of the Ten Commandments from a State court? No law, by definition of the First Amendment, exists for or against placing the Ten Commandments in the State court house.
Rating: 1 / 5