Early Americanists will find Jane Fiegen Green's "Procreation and Power in Early America" of interest. In her review she includes - Mark Kann's Taming Passion for the Public Good: Policing Sex in the Early Republic (NYU Press).
- M. Michelle Jarrett Morris's Under Household Governance: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts (Harvard University Press).
- Mark E. Brandon's States of Union: Family and Change in the American Constitutional Order (University Press of Kansas).
"Why are governments interested in the procreative habits of their citizens? Why especially does a democratic government—ostensibly formed to protect individual rights—concern itself with the private activities of consenting adults? These questions could be raised in debates over same-sex marriage or insurance coverage for contraception in the twenty-first century United States. But three recent books on the intersection of family, sex, and the law show us why the regulation of parents and children has been central to the organization of power since the colonial period."
There's plenty on rights in the special issue. For example, Bruce Ackerman's We the People, Volume III: The Civil Rights Revolution (Belknap) is doubly reviewed. First by James Fleming in "Fidelity To Our Constitution," and second by Sidney Tarrow in "The People Maybe? Opening the Civil Rights Revolution to Social Movements." Tarrow's opening paragraph:
"Bruce Ackerman has done it again: he has published the third in his magisterial se- ries of books on American political/constitutional history. The first volume, We the People: Foundations, made the greatest splash among constitutional lawyers. Its innovation was to range well outside formalist boundaries to bring popular politics into the study of constitutional revision. His second volume, We the People: Transformations, focused on the transformations in U.S. constitutional practice from the Civil War through the New Deal. The third volume, We the People: The Civil Rights Rovolution (hereinafter CRR), brings the story up to the civil rights revolution, which Ackerman sees as the latest con- stituent moment in American history. Among them, these three volumes contribute to one side of a growing bridge between constitutional scholars and students of social movements."
Leslie Goldstein's review, "The Birth and Rebirth of Civil Rights in America" takes a look at both- American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment by Gerard N. Magliocca (NYU Press).
- Civil Rights in the Shadow of Slavery: The Constitution, Common Law and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by George Rutherglen (Oxford University Press).
Laura Woliver's "Dissent is Patriotic: Disobedient Founders, Narratives, and Street Battles," includes reviews of
- Government by Dissent: Protest, Resistance, and the Radical Democratic Theory in the Early American Republic by Robert WT Martin (NYU Press).
- Lewis Perry's Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition (Yale University Press).
There's loads more reviews after the break.
More Con Law can be found in Joseph Reisert's "Living Dogma" which includes a review of Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning by Justin Buckley Dyer (Cambridge University Press).
Kathleen Sullivan's "The Civic Constitution" includes discussion of Kristin A. Goss's The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women's Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press).
"Goss explains that the women’s movement did not dismantle after the Nineteenth Amendment. Replacing the “wave” metaphor with that of a river, Goss follows the tributaries, where she finds plenty of civic activity after 1920. There was a multiplicity of groups working for both women’s issues and staking claim to broader national issues, such as war and democracy. Furthermore, these groups were membership-based, with local chapters and active participation, working their way up to a national presence that testified on Capitol Hill. Goss thus identifies ongoing, vibrant civic engagement after 1920. In contrast, the period after the peak of the second wave women’s movement shows women’s groups that tend to be professional organizations focused more narrowly on specific women’s issues. Testimony before Congress dropped, and the scope of women’s groups’ claims narrowed as well. Goss identifies this as a loss of women’s civic place, which “encompasses the civic identity on which groups draw to construct their interests and jus- tify their political authority, the modes of collective action that groups deploy to press those interests, and the policy niche that groups legitimately occupy.”"
Administrative law can be found in Jed H. Shugerman's "The Legitimacy of Administrative Law," which examines:
- Daniel R. Ernst's Tocqueville's Nightmare: The Administrate State Emerges in America, 1900-1940 (Oxford University Press).
- Joanna Grisinger's The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press).
- Jerry L. Mashaw's Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (Yale University Press).
- Nicholas R. Parrillo's Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940 (Yale University Press).
Shugerman begins his review:
"“How does an alien imposition attain legitimacy?” asks Nicholas Parrillo in Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940. Parrillo and three other historians address this question in a group of outstanding new books on the rise of American administrative law. Each book reflects the various ways in which American administrative law has been an alien imposition: filling a “hole” in the text of the Constitution that did not address administrative powers; changing the traditional separation of powers of legislative rule-making and judicial adjudication with individualized due process; imposing centralized bureaucracy over local self-rule; imposing the rule of experts over the populace; and imposing one party’s structure over the other party’s dissent."
Then there is Rashmi Dyal-Chand's review, "Housing as Holdout: Segregation in American Neighborhoods," which includes Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb by Douglas S. Massey et al. (Princeton University Press).
Joseph Blocher examines "New Approaches to Old Questions in Gun Scholarship," and includes in his review essay:
- Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms by Nicholas Johnson (Prometheus).
- Akinyele Omowale Umoja's We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (NYU Press).
In "The Highs and Lows of Wild Justice," by Corinna Lain, Evan J. Mandery's A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America (Norton) is reviewed.
Paul Kens reviews two works in "Revision of Progressive Era History Continues":
- Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era edited by Joseph W. Postal and Jonathan O'Neill (Palgrave).
- David M. Rabban's Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (Cambridge University Press).
"The two books featured in this review join the modern trend of revisionist scholarship that reassesses legal history inherited from the Progressive Era. Motivated by their belief that Progressives misrepresented conservatives of the era as mere apologists for the economic elite, the authors of Toward an American Conservatism maintain that some conservative leaders of the era were actually advocates of a philosophy faithful to the Constitution. Similarly, Laws History observes that misrepresentations by leading Progressive scholars helped sociological jurisprudence supplant history as a means of studying and understanding law. David Rabban’s goal is to return the study of legal history to a promi- nent role. Beyond this similarity the books are vastly different in style, method, and purpose."
The executive branch is the focus of Marc Landy's "Incrementalism v. Disjuncture: The President and American Political Development," which reviews- The Contested Removal Power, 1789-2010 by J. David Alvis, Jeremy D. Bailey, and F. Flagg Taylor (University Press of Kansas).
- The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy by Michael J. Gerhardt (Oxford University Press).
