Supreme Discomfort

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Supreme Discomfort

Author : Kevin Merida,Michael Fletcher
Publisher : Crown
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2008-04-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780767916363

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Supreme Discomfort by Kevin Merida,Michael Fletcher Pdf

“Justice Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court’s most reclusive member [and] a prime candidate for a careful, fair-minded biography. In delivering it, Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher have done some quiet justice of their own.”—Washington Post There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood African American in our public life than Clarence Thomas. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a haunting portrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by much of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society, internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural poverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to the pinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions on crime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposed him to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he is himself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited from racially conscious admissions policies. Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reported work that features testimony from friends and foes alike who have never spoken in public about Thomas before—including a candid conversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, Antonin Scalia. It offers a long-overdue window into a man who straddles two different worlds and is uneasy in both—and whose divided personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply influence American life for years to come.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

Author : Corey Robin
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2019-09-24
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781627793841

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The Enigma of Clarence Thomas by Corey Robin Pdf

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is a groundbreaking revisionist take on the Supreme Court justice everyone knows about but no one knows. Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don’t know: Thomas is a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In the first examination of its kind, Corey Robin – one of the foremost analysts of the right – delves deeply into both Thomas’s biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas’s conservative views, Robin shows, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by racism; the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There’s a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn’t speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they’d hear a racial pessimism that often sounds similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today’s political stalemate.

My Grandfather's Son

Author : Clarence Thomas
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2021-10-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780063235922

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My Grandfather's Son by Clarence Thomas Pdf

Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words. Thomas speaks out, revealing the pieces of his life he holds dear, detailing the suffering and injustices he has overcome, including the polarizing Senate hearing involving a former aide, Anita Hill, and the depression and despair it created in his own life and the lives of those closest to him. In this candid and deeply moving memoir, a quintessential American tale of hardship and grit, Clarence Thomas recounts his astonishing journey for the first time.

Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution

Author : Myron Magnet
Publisher : Encounter Books
Page : 151 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2019-05-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781641770538

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Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution by Myron Magnet Pdf

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written—the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states. He found that his predecessors on the Court were complicit in the first step of this transformation, when in the 1870s they defanged the Civil War amendments intended to give full citizenship to his fellow black Americans. In the next generation, Woodrow Wilson, dismissing the framers and their work as obsolete, set out to replace laws made by the people’s representatives with rules made by highly educated, modern, supposedly nonpartisan “experts,” an idea Franklin Roosevelt supersized in the New Deal agencies that he acknowledged had no constitutional warrant. Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age. But Thomas, who joined the Court after eight years running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court—the most important of them explained in these pages in clear, non-lawyerly language—he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed. A free, self-governing nation needs independent-minded, self-reliant citizens, and Thomas’s biography, vividly recounted here, produced just the kind of character that the founders assumed would always mark Americans. America’s future depends on the power of its culture and institutions to form ever more citizens of this stamp.

Justices and Journalists

Author : Richard Davis
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2011-02-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781139496872

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Justices and Journalists by Richard Davis Pdf

Justices and Journalists examines whether justices are becoming more publicity-conscious and why that might be happening. The book discusses the motives of justices 'going public' and details their recent increased number of television and print interviews and amount of press coverage of their speeches. The book describes the interactions justices have with the journalists who cover them. These interactions typically are not discussed publicly by justices or journalists. The book explains why justices care about press and public relations, how they employ external strategies to affect press portrayals of themselves and their institution, and how and why journalists participate in that interaction. Drawing on the papers of Supreme Court justices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book examines these interactions over the history of the Court. It includes a content analysis of print and broadcast media coverage of Supreme Court justices covering a 40-year period from 1968 to 2007.

When Labels Fail

Author : C.B. Shotwell
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2006-09-06
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781450081283

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When Labels Fail by C.B. Shotwell Pdf

WHEN LABELS FAIL: A PARADOXICAL VIEW OF THE SUPREME COURT As in recent actions of the Supreme Court concerning same sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act, don ́t be surprised when pundits and ideologues fail at predictions regarding pending decisions of the Court. This book explains why so many get it wrong so often. At root cause are erroneous preconceptions about the Court. "I ́m not big on labels" replied retiring Associate Justice John Paul Stevens during an interview concerning changing blocs on the Supreme Court. “I don’t use labels to describe what I do” is how Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor responded during her confirmation hearing when a senator sought to categorize her judicial philosophy. Simplistic labels for the justices have repeatedly misled Presidents, Senators, lawyers, and pundits with regard to the performance of justices on the Supreme Court. Despite best efforts to predict behavior of nominees for the Court, the justices defied political categorization, such as: • The Virginia lawyer who lost his states’ rights case before the Supreme Court, but went on to support Federalist Party causes as Chief Justice. • The ex-Federalist Party politician and Secretary of the Treasury who as Chief Justice strongly supported states’ rights. • The esteemed Massachusetts justice who outraged the progressive president who nominated him to the Court by voting to strike down key anti-trust legislation. • The co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union who shocked former colleagues by consistently voting to curtail civil liberties and civil rights in cases before the Court. • The staunch New Deal supporter who over his long tenure on the Court came to favor individual rights and liberties over governmental power. • The former Ku Klux Klan member who helped forge a unanimous Court ruling in the seminal decision against racial segregation. • Appointed by a liberal Democratic president, the justice who steadfastly supported law and order, the right to life, and other conservative causes. • An originalist whose conservative methodology frequently leads to liberal results. This book explores the origin of the separation of powers doctrine, how the Constitution created a judiciary designed to stand apart from the “political” branches of government, and how justices have asserted independence as a third branch of government from John Jay to John Roberts. For more information, go to: www.courtpolitics.weebly.com

In Defense of Uncle Tom

Author : Brando Simeo Starkey
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2015-01-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107070042

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In Defense of Uncle Tom by Brando Simeo Starkey Pdf

This book shadows the usage of 'Uncle Tom' to understand how social norms associated with the phrase were constructed and enforced.

The Rehnquist Court and Criminal Justice

Author : Christopher E. Smith,Christina DeJong,Michael McCall
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2011-11-16
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780739140826

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The Rehnquist Court and Criminal Justice by Christopher E. Smith,Christina DeJong,Michael McCall Pdf

This book examines the criminal justice decisions of the Rehnquist Court era through analyses of individual justices' contributions to the development of law and policy. The Rehnquist Court era (1986-2005) produced a period of opportunity for the U.S. Supreme Court's judicial conservatives to reshape constitutional law concerning rights in the criminal justice process. It was an era in which the Court produced many hotly-debated decisions concerning such issues as capital punishment, search and seizure, police interrogations, and prisoners' rights. The Court's most conservative justice, William H. Rehnquist, ascended to the key leadership position of Chief Justice and he was joined on the Court by two new appointees, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who were equally supportive of both greater authority for police and limited definitions of constitutional rights for suspects, defendants, and criminal offenders. The Rehnquist Court era decisions refined and narrowed many of the rights-expanding decisions of the Warren Court era (1953-1969). However, the Supreme Court did not ultimately eliminate the Warren era's foundational rights concepts in criminal justice, such as the exclusionary rule and Miranda warnings. As the leading liberal voices of the Warren era, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, retired early in the Rehnquist era, the Court experienced continued advocacy of broad conceptions for many rights through the increased assertiveness of Republican appointees Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter as well as the arrival of new Democratic appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. In many important cases, the justices advocating the preservation of constitutional protections could prevail, even on a generally conservative Court, by persuading one or more of President Ronald Reagan's appointees to support a particular right for suspects and defendants. Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, in particular, shaped outcomes within a divided Court as they determined which of the Court’s wings with which they would align in a particular case. The contributors to this volume identify and highlight the unique perspectives and influential decisions of individual justices as the means for understanding the Rehnquist Court’s imprint on criminal justice.

The Nine

Author : Jeffrey Toobin
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2008-09-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780307472892

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The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin Pdf

Acclaimed journalist Jeffrey Toobin takes us into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, revealing the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land. An institution at a moment of transition, the Court now stands at a crucial point, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, and church-state relations. Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and with a keen sense of the Court’s history and the trajectory of its future, Jeffrey Toobin creates in The Nine a riveting story of one of the most important forces in American life today.

Scalia

Author : Bruce Allen Murphy
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 656 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2014-06-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781451611465

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Scalia by Bruce Allen Murphy Pdf

“[Murphy’s] biography of Justice Scalia is patient and thorough, alive both intellectually and morally….Functions as an MRI scan of one of the most influential conservative thinkers of the twentieth century.” (The New York Times): An authoritative, incisive and deeply researched book about of the most controversial Supreme Court justice of our time. Scalia: A Court of One is the compelling story of one of the most polarizing figures to serve on the nation’s highest court. Bruce Allen Murphy shows how Scalia changed the legal landscape through his controversial theories of textualism and originalism, interpreting the meaning of the Constitution’s words as he claimed they were understood during the nation’s Founding period. But Scalia’s judicial conservatism is informed as much by his highly traditional Catholicism and political partisanship as by his reading of the Constitution; his opinionated speeches, contentious public appearances, and newsworthy interviews have made him a lightning rod for controversy. Scalia is “an intellectual biography of one of [the Supreme Court’s] most colorful members” (Chicago Tribune), combined with an insightful analysis of the Supreme Court and its influence on American life over the past quarter century. Scalia began his career practicing law in Cleveland, Ohio, and rose to become the president’s lawyer as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel for President Gerald R. Ford. His sterling academic and legal credentials led to his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1982. In 1986, he successfully outmaneuvered the more senior Robert Bork to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Scalia’s evident legal brilliance, ambition and personal magnetism led everyone to predict he would unite a new conservative majority under Chief Justice William Rehnquist and change American law in the process. Instead he became a Court of One. Rather than bringing the conservatives together, Scalia drove them apart. He attacked and alienated his more moderate colleagues Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy. Scalia prevented the conservative majority from coalescing for nearly two decades.

Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement

Author : Christopher M. Richardson,Ralph E. Luker
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 663 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2014-06-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780810880375

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Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement by Christopher M. Richardson,Ralph E. Luker Pdf

The fiftieth anniversary of many major milestones in what is commonly called the African-American Civil Rights Movement was celebrated in 2013. Fifty years removed from the Birmingham campaign, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington and it is clear that the sacrifices borne by those generations in that decade were not in vain. Monuments, museums, and exhibitions across the world honor the men and women of the Movement and testify to their immeasurable role in redefining the United States. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement is a guide to the history of the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. The history of this period is covered in a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, significant legal cases, local struggles, forgotten heroes, and prominent women in the Movement. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Civil Rights Movement.

Modern American Lives

Author : Blaine T. Browne
Publisher : M.E. Sharpe
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2015-05-18
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780765629104

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Modern American Lives by Blaine T. Browne Pdf

The individuals presented in these narrative biographies significantly, and sometimes decisively, impacted contemporary American life in a wide range of areas, including national politics, foreign policy, social and political activism, popular and literary culture, sports, and business. The combined biographical/thematic approach is designed to serve two purposes: to present more substantive biographical information, and to offer a fuller examination of key events and issues. The book is an ideal supplement for undergraduate courses on The United States Since 1945, as well as for courses on Modern America and 20th Century America.

Affirmative Action

Author : John W. Johnson,Robert P. Green Jr.
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2009-05-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780313081323

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Affirmative Action by John W. Johnson,Robert P. Green Jr. Pdf

Affirmative Action recounts the fascinating history of a civil rights provision considered vital to protecting and promoting equality, but still bitterly contested in the courts—and in the court of public opinion. "Special consideration" or "reverse discrimination"? This examination traces the genesis and development of affirmative action and the continuing controversy that constitutes the story of racial and gender preferences. It pays attention to the individuals, the events, and the ideas that spawned federal and selected state affirmative action policies—and the resistance to those policies. Perhaps most important, it probes the key legal challenges to affirmative action in the nation's courts. The controversy over affirmative action in America has been marked by a persistent tension between its advocates, who emphasize the necessity of overcoming historical patterns of racial and gender injustice, and its critics, who insist on the integrity of color and gender blindness. In the wake of related U.S. Supreme Court decisions of 2007, Affirmative Action brings the story of one of the most embattled public policy issues of the last half century up to date, demonstrating that social justice cannot simply be legislated into existence, nor can voices on either side of the debate be ignored.

The City of Man

Author : Pierre Manent
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 0691050252

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The City of Man by Pierre Manent Pdf

The "City of God" or the "City of Man"? This is the choice St. Augustine offered 1500 years ago--and according to Pierre Manent the modern West has decisively and irreversibly chosen the latter. In this subtle and wide-ranging book on the Western intellectual and political condition, Manent argues that the West has rejected the laws of God and of nature in a quest for human autonomy. But in declaring ourselves free and autonomous, he contends, we have, paradoxically, lost a sense of what it means to be human. In the first part of the book, Manent explores the development of the social sciences since the seventeenth century, portraying their growth as a sign of increasing human "self-consciousness." But as social scientists have sought to free us from the intellectual confines of the ancient world, he writes, they have embraced modes of analysis--economic, sociological, and historical--that treat only narrow aspects of the human condition and portray individuals as helpless victims of impersonal forces. As a result, we have lost all sense of human agency and of the unified human subject at the center of intellectual study. Politics and culture have come to be seen as mere foam on the tides of historical and social necessity. In the second half of the book, titled "Self-Affirmation," Manent examines how the West, having discovered freedom, then discovered arbitrary will and its dangers. With no shared touchstones or conceptions of virtue, for example, we have found it increasingly hard to communicate with each other. This is a striking contrast to the past, he writes, when even traditions as different as the Classical and the Christian held many of these conceptions in common. The result of these discoveries, according to Manent, is the disturbing rootlessness that characterizes our time. By gaining autonomy from external authority, we have lost a sense of what we are. In "giving birth" to ourselves, we have abandoned that which alone can nurture and sustain us. With penetrating insight and remarkable erudition, Manent offers a profound analysis of the confusions and contradictions at the heart of the modern condition.

Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide

Author : Stephen Briggs,Alessandra Lemma,William Crouch
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2009-05-07
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781135250126

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Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide by Stephen Briggs,Alessandra Lemma,William Crouch Pdf

Alessandra Lemma - Winner of the Levy-Goldfarb Award for Child Psychoanalysis! Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide presents original studies and research from contemporary psychoanalysts, therapists and academics focusing on the psychoanalytic understanding of suicide and self-harm, and how this can be applied to clinical work and policy. This powerful critique of current thinking suggests that suicide and self-harm must be understood as having meaning within interpersonal and intrapsychic relationships, offering a new and more hopeful dimension for prevention and recovery. Divided into three sections, the book includes: a theoretical overview examples of psychoanalytic practice with self-harming and suicidal patients applications of psychoanalytic thinking to suicide and self-harm prevention. Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide will be helpful to psychoanalytic therapists, analysts and mental health professionals wanting to integrate psychoanalytic ideas into their work with self-harmers and the suicidal. This text will also be of use to academics and professionals involved in suicidal prevention.