Separating Power : Essays on the Founding Period
Editorial Reviews
The New York Times Book Review, Douglas A. Sylva
Many constitutional scholars believe that if they could only pierce the fog created by the Constitution's wonderful obscurity and our own historical distance, the thoughts of men like Jefferson and Madison could help resolve current political controversies. But in Separating Power, Gerhard Casper advances the unsettling opinion that we must face questions about the separation of powers without the Founding Fathers' help: they cannot guide us because they themselves were hopelessly confused.
Review
Lawrence Lessig, University of Chicago Law School : Originalists taught that constitutional law must return to founding understandings as a guide to current interpretive questions about the meaning and scope of the constitution. What they didn't teach was how little such an inquiry would yield. Casper's beautiful and rich account of founding ideas about separating powers reveals just how little the framers had finally worked out, and how much our modern understanding differs from what they did work out. This book, in its simple and elegant directness, is a compelling account of the struggles and complexity that confronted the founding generation as they erected a constituting regime of separated powers. It will undermine arguments that imagine that the framers gave us a structure already worked out. If one thought constitutional law should be about returning to the answers the framers left us, this book shows unavoidably that there were few answers, if any, that the framers meant to leave.
Separating Power : Essays on the Founding Period
Separating Power : Essays on the Founding Period,Gerhard Casper,Harvard University Press,0674801407,1783-1809,Civics & Citizenship,Constitutional history,Constitutions,General,History,Legal System,Political Science,Politics / Current Events,Politics and government,Reference,Separation of powers,U.S. Constitutional History,U.S. Federal Government,United States,Law / Constitutional
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