What do you think?
Rate this book
Who Decides?: States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation
A unique defense of Federalism, making the case that constitutional law in America--encompassing the systems of all 51 governments--should have a role in assessing the right balance of power among all branches of our state and federal governments.
Everything in law and politics, including individual rights, comes back to divisions of power and the evergreen Who decides? Who wins the disputes of the day often turns on who decides them. And our acceptance of the resolution of those disputes often turns on who the decision maker is-because it reveals who governs us.
In Who Decides , the influential US Appellate Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton focuses on the constitutional structure of the American states to answer the question of who should decide the key questions of public policy today. By concentrating on the role of governmental structure in shaping power across the 50 American states, Sutton develops a powerful explanation of American constitutional law, in all of its variety, as opposed to just federal constitutional law. As in his earlier book, 51 Imperfect Solutions , which looked at how American federalism allowed the states to serve as laboratories of innovation for protecting individual liberty and property rights, Sutton compares state-level governments with the federal government and draws numerous insights from the comparisons. Instead of focusing on individual rights, however, he focuses on structure, while continuing to develop some of the core themes of his previous book.
An illuminating and essential sequel to his earlier work on the nature of American federalism, Who Decides makes the case that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in assessing the right balance of power among all branches of government. Taken together, both books reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system, one that ought to make lawyers and litigants pause before reflexively assuming that the United States Supreme Court alone has the answers to our vexing constitutional questions.
Everything in law and politics, including individual rights, comes back to divisions of power and the evergreen Who decides? Who wins the disputes of the day often turns on who decides them. And our acceptance of the resolution of those disputes often turns on who the decision maker is-because it reveals who governs us.
In Who Decides , the influential US Appellate Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton focuses on the constitutional structure of the American states to answer the question of who should decide the key questions of public policy today. By concentrating on the role of governmental structure in shaping power across the 50 American states, Sutton develops a powerful explanation of American constitutional law, in all of its variety, as opposed to just federal constitutional law. As in his earlier book, 51 Imperfect Solutions , which looked at how American federalism allowed the states to serve as laboratories of innovation for protecting individual liberty and property rights, Sutton compares state-level governments with the federal government and draws numerous insights from the comparisons. Instead of focusing on individual rights, however, he focuses on structure, while continuing to develop some of the core themes of his previous book.
An illuminating and essential sequel to his earlier work on the nature of American federalism, Who Decides makes the case that American Constitutional Law should account for the role of the state courts and state constitutions, together with the federal courts and the federal constitution, in assessing the right balance of power among all branches of government. Taken together, both books reveal a remarkably complex, nuanced, ever-changing federalist system, one that ought to make lawyers and litigants pause before reflexively assuming that the United States Supreme Court alone has the answers to our vexing constitutional questions.
- GenresLawPoliticsNonfiction
492 pages, Hardcover
Published November 1, 2021
20 people are currently reading
203 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 9, 2024
Jeffrey S. Sutton is a constitutional scholar and Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. This book is a deep dive into Constitutional law, both federal and state. The basic premise of the book is that our law, particularly with respect to Constitutional rights, has become “over-federalized.” Judge Sutton thinks that litigants are too quick to look to federal courts to establish or safeguard their rights and that federal courts, including the US Supreme Court, are too eager to decide constitutional questions that may have far-reaching consequences. Instead, he suggests more involvement by the states. He notes that most, or all, state constitutions are easier to amend than the US Constitution and that states can therefore serve as incubators in the development of the law, experimenting and innovating. According to the author, it is only when a national consensus has formed as a result of this process that the federal courts should get involved. He also suggests that, when it comes to fundamental rights, different states may see things differently, and that, as a result, one’s rights may depend upon the state in which one lives, and that is ok. After all, isn’t that what federalism is all about?
Some interesting questions are raised, and you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about state constitutions if you read this book. One of Judge Sutton’s pet peeves is what he refers to as constitutional amendment by judicial decision. On the one hand, he understands it because the US Constitution is almost impossible to amend. But he dislikes it because he sees it as judges legislating their policy preferences in the guise of judicial decision-making, contrary to the wishes of the framers, who deliberately made it difficult to amend the Constitution by requiring three quarters of the states to ratify an amendment before it takes effect. He points out that there is no debate in the states as to whether their constitutions are “living documents” because, as norms change, their constitutions are amended.
No one should mistake this for an objective discussion of constitutional law. This is a work of conservative legal advocacy. Judge Sutton is a conservative, a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, appointed to the Sixth Circuit by President George W. Bush, and a Federalist Society member and frequent contributor. Before he was appointed to the bench, he was a go-to litigator for the right wing when it sought to limit rights under legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Voting Rights Act. In the book, he discusses many “hot” issues, such as the right (or not) to abortion, gay marriage, the Chevron doctrine, and partisan gerrymandering. Not surprisingly, his conclusions uniformly find that the positions taken by the political right are constitutionally correct. So, you may want to view this as an effort to find constitutional support for the policy positions favored by political conservatives.
The book is divided into five parts, dealing with the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government, the involvement of municipalities, and the amendment process. In each section, the author examines state and federal constitutional provisions, approaches and case law, and he then sets forth his view of what the correct ways to handle the various issues discussed should be. Sometimes he’ll raise a question at the beginning of a section (e.g., whether courts should continue to follow the Chevron doctrine) and you can guess how he will come out in the end. (Hint, the right-wing view always prevails). The book was published in 2021 and Judge Sutton correctly forecasts Supreme Court decisions that came out later, such as the Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights and the Relentless and Loper cases that overruled Chevron. Perhaps he’s clairvoyant, or it could be that the Supreme Court majority is made up of his pals from the Federalist Society.
In the section on judicial power, Judge Sutton, who is an originalist/textualist, spends a lot of time complaining about federal judges employing their power to “innovate rights,” “create unenumerated rights,” and “invent rights out of thin air” that are NOWHERE MENTIONED IN THE TEXT OF THE CONSTITUTION. You know that he’s talking about abortion and gay marriage, though he downplays the discussion of policy choices. After all, he’s an objective federal judge, and, who knows, some of these issues may come up before the Sixth Circuit. But it was the premise of the complaint that I found interesting. He didn’t discuss his assumption, but Judge Sutton clearly believes that rights are doled out to citizens by government, and that a right can’t exist unless there is a particular grant by the government. But is this the only view, or even the correct view? Some might differ.
You could look at the Constitution the way Judge Sutton does – as a document that determines the structure of government and outlines the rights granted to citizens. Or you could look at from the assumption that citizens are inherently free and that constitutions (and other systems of laws) define the extent to which citizens agree that government may infringe upon their freedom in the interest of creating an orderly society. In the latter case, the citizens retain their liberties unless they have specifically agreed to give them up. There is evidence that the framers of the US Constitution agreed with this latter view. The default is freedom, unless the right has clearly been relinquished. There is an interesting discussion at constitutioncenter.org on this issue. Many of the delegates to the constitutional convention were originally against including a bill of rights in the Constitution and some considered it to be dangerous because the government was intended to be limited and a listing of rights would imply that citizens were surrendering their cherished inherent rights to government power. Eventually, the Bill of Rights was included, but no one considered it to be an exhaustive list of rights. Included in the Bill of Rights was the Ninth Amendment, stating that the enumeration of rights did not deny other rights that were retained by the people. The Ninth Amendment, and the view that citizens have inherent rights, are ignored in the author’s many rants against “court-created” rights. A lack of mention in the Constitution of a particular right does not foreclose that it exists. Perhaps some judges are just too blind to see what is evident to others.
One of the clear objectives of the book’s discussion is to promote the view that citizens should look to the states, and not to the federal courts, to protect their rights. Isn’t that how we got Jim Crow? Sometimes federal intervention is necessary.
One of the other claims made by Judge Sutton in this section is that states are now defining rights by the standards employed in the federal courts and that the states are in “lockstep” with the federal system, applying its standards and relying on its court decisions. Is that true? I’ve practiced law in New York for nearly forty years and worked as a clerk for two years at a state appellate court. As far as I can tell, there is wide recognition in New York that some state constitutional protections in New York are broader than their federal counterparts and my experience has been that New York appellate decisions rely heavily on precedents of the New York Court of Appeals and the state’s appellate divisions and that federal cases are rarely cited. I’m not a constitutional scholar and can’t speak to what goes on in other states, but the author’s representation is contrary to my experience.
The section on the executive ably contrasts the federal system’s “unitary executive,” as opposed to state systems where there are separate elections for governor and other state officials, such as attorneys general, and then quickly is turned to a lengthy discussion of the role of administrative agencies. Judge Sutton does a good job of explaining why many citizens and judges object to agencies having the power to adjudicate matters and to interpret statutes on the grounds of the non-delegation doctrine and the doctrine of the separation of powers. He then launches into a sustained attack on the Chevron doctrine, which, at the time of the book’s publication, was still binding Supreme Court precedent. Judge Sutton gets a little cheeky here, warning the Supreme Court that judges who opposed the doctrine would find ways around it, or simply ignore it, to decide cases the way that they want. Fortunately, there was no confrontation with the Supremes, who dutifully struck down Chevron at the next convenient opportunity.
You might think that a conservative like Judge Sutton would be disturbed by courts overruling prior decisions, a frequent occurrence at the Supreme Court these days. After all, isn’t stare decisis a foundational concept in the American legal system, insuring stability in the courts and enhancing their credibility? Au contraire. He likes getting rid of old cases “wrongfully decided” by previous, less wise, judges who undoubtedly were misled by “special interests.” But aren’t judges activists when they overrule precedent to impose their policy preferences, like abortion bans and an AR15 in the hands of everyone, whether mentally ill or not? No, no, no. The author cites fellow Judge Douglas Ginsburg’s observation that such judicial overrulings are correctives of previous, passive judges who allowed “liberal norms” to predominate. Judge Ginsburg is a professor at, you guessed it, the Antonin S. Scalia Law School at George Mason University. By the way, the judge most frequently cited in this book is Justice Scalia.
Judge Sutton expresses concerns about the “liberty” that is infringed when one is subjected to administrative regulation, an interesting contrast to his lack of concern for the liberty interests of persons seeking to control family planning decisions or choose a compatible spouse. He also darkly warns us about the “interest groups” (unidentified) who are the bad people advocating administrative regulation. You mean, like environmental groups and citizens groups who don’t want corporations to poison their drinking water and pollute their air? Left unmentioned is the fact that the entire attack on Chevron has been orchestrated by corporate polluters who don’t want to be regulated. But they apparently are not “interest groups.”
The section on the legislative branch gets off to a slow start, as Judge Sutton spends a lot of time lecturing us about state laws that require that proposed laws have clear titles, address only a single subject, and, in the case of proposals to spend money, do so for a public purpose. None of these is a scintillating legal issue, but the point of the discussion of lawsuits arising from alleged violations of these principles is to demonstrate that some issues are “political questions” beyond the power of courts to adjudicate. This leads us to the issue of partisan gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court found beyond its power to correct, a decision with which Judge Sutton agrees. He is right that these issues are complicated, especially when one considers requirements imposed by prior Supreme Court decisions such as Baker v Carr and the Voting Rights Act. But should we just throw up our hands and give up? Apparently so. Judge Sutton suggests that the impetus for change should come from citizens, who should pressure their legislators to outlaw the practice or establish non-partisan commissions to draw district lines. There is a lot of appeal to these suggestions. But what do we do when some states draw lines fairly and others don’t, thereby favoring one party over another? Isn’t that a national problem that requires a national solution?
There is a lot of merit to Judge Sutton’s suggestion that citizens should not place too much reliance on federal courts to protect their rights. Though many national issues require comprehensive solutions, one must consider the makeup of the courts. With the courts packed with partisan actors, citizens may well have a better chance of prevailing in a state court. It’s a pretty good argument for either having judges subject to elections or term limits, suggestions that Judge Sutton finds to have some merit.
The book’s final section draws some interesting contrasts between constitutions that are too easy to amend (many state constitutions) and another that is too hard to amend (the US Constitution). With his evident enthusiasm for state constitutions, Judge Sutton had pretty much convinced me that the US Constitution is horribly outdated and unworkable, requiring radical change to get rid of anti-democratic vestiges of the distant past, like the Electoral College and the awarding of two Senate seats to each state, no matter how large or small. But the only suggestion that he made was a possible change to allow an amendment to take effect if it is ratified by two thirds of the states, rather than the present three quarters. What is more significant in this section is his proposal to eliminate “judicial amendment” of the Constitution. He suggests a bottom-up approach, where a right would have to be established at the local level, then adopted at the state level, then adopted by the number of states required to ratify an amendment before a court at the federal level could consider recognizing that right. In other words, unless it’s a slam dunk that the right would be recognized by the adoption of a constitutional amendment, a court couldn’t recognize it. If this was the view throughout history, how would it have worked? Would there be a Brown v Board of Education? What about Griswold, Roe, Obergefell, Miranda? It sounds like Judge Sutton would leave us stuck in the 18th century, with very little prospect of getting out of it.
Judge Sutton suggests that the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend, because the people “want it that way.” I question this, based on the evidence supplied in the book. When the opportunity to amend has been presented in the states, the people have eagerly embraced it. Thousands of amendments have been adopted. Why wouldn’t they react the same way when it comes to the US Constitution? Judge Sutton suggests that certain measures widely used in the states, such as voter initiatives and referendums, “wouldn’t work” at the federal level, but he presents no reasons why. He also points out that the states are much more democratic than the federal government. But then he says that there can be “too much democracy.” Sounds like the view of someone trying to justify a system where a well-off minority rules the rest of us on an authoritarian basis.
I applaud Judge Sutton for this comprehensive study, though I disagree with his selectivity and many of his conclusions. The book is very dense and difficult to get through. But people should be thinking about, discussing and debating these issues.
Some interesting questions are raised, and you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about state constitutions if you read this book. One of Judge Sutton’s pet peeves is what he refers to as constitutional amendment by judicial decision. On the one hand, he understands it because the US Constitution is almost impossible to amend. But he dislikes it because he sees it as judges legislating their policy preferences in the guise of judicial decision-making, contrary to the wishes of the framers, who deliberately made it difficult to amend the Constitution by requiring three quarters of the states to ratify an amendment before it takes effect. He points out that there is no debate in the states as to whether their constitutions are “living documents” because, as norms change, their constitutions are amended.
No one should mistake this for an objective discussion of constitutional law. This is a work of conservative legal advocacy. Judge Sutton is a conservative, a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, appointed to the Sixth Circuit by President George W. Bush, and a Federalist Society member and frequent contributor. Before he was appointed to the bench, he was a go-to litigator for the right wing when it sought to limit rights under legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Voting Rights Act. In the book, he discusses many “hot” issues, such as the right (or not) to abortion, gay marriage, the Chevron doctrine, and partisan gerrymandering. Not surprisingly, his conclusions uniformly find that the positions taken by the political right are constitutionally correct. So, you may want to view this as an effort to find constitutional support for the policy positions favored by political conservatives.
The book is divided into five parts, dealing with the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government, the involvement of municipalities, and the amendment process. In each section, the author examines state and federal constitutional provisions, approaches and case law, and he then sets forth his view of what the correct ways to handle the various issues discussed should be. Sometimes he’ll raise a question at the beginning of a section (e.g., whether courts should continue to follow the Chevron doctrine) and you can guess how he will come out in the end. (Hint, the right-wing view always prevails). The book was published in 2021 and Judge Sutton correctly forecasts Supreme Court decisions that came out later, such as the Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights and the Relentless and Loper cases that overruled Chevron. Perhaps he’s clairvoyant, or it could be that the Supreme Court majority is made up of his pals from the Federalist Society.
In the section on judicial power, Judge Sutton, who is an originalist/textualist, spends a lot of time complaining about federal judges employing their power to “innovate rights,” “create unenumerated rights,” and “invent rights out of thin air” that are NOWHERE MENTIONED IN THE TEXT OF THE CONSTITUTION. You know that he’s talking about abortion and gay marriage, though he downplays the discussion of policy choices. After all, he’s an objective federal judge, and, who knows, some of these issues may come up before the Sixth Circuit. But it was the premise of the complaint that I found interesting. He didn’t discuss his assumption, but Judge Sutton clearly believes that rights are doled out to citizens by government, and that a right can’t exist unless there is a particular grant by the government. But is this the only view, or even the correct view? Some might differ.
You could look at the Constitution the way Judge Sutton does – as a document that determines the structure of government and outlines the rights granted to citizens. Or you could look at from the assumption that citizens are inherently free and that constitutions (and other systems of laws) define the extent to which citizens agree that government may infringe upon their freedom in the interest of creating an orderly society. In the latter case, the citizens retain their liberties unless they have specifically agreed to give them up. There is evidence that the framers of the US Constitution agreed with this latter view. The default is freedom, unless the right has clearly been relinquished. There is an interesting discussion at constitutioncenter.org on this issue. Many of the delegates to the constitutional convention were originally against including a bill of rights in the Constitution and some considered it to be dangerous because the government was intended to be limited and a listing of rights would imply that citizens were surrendering their cherished inherent rights to government power. Eventually, the Bill of Rights was included, but no one considered it to be an exhaustive list of rights. Included in the Bill of Rights was the Ninth Amendment, stating that the enumeration of rights did not deny other rights that were retained by the people. The Ninth Amendment, and the view that citizens have inherent rights, are ignored in the author’s many rants against “court-created” rights. A lack of mention in the Constitution of a particular right does not foreclose that it exists. Perhaps some judges are just too blind to see what is evident to others.
One of the clear objectives of the book’s discussion is to promote the view that citizens should look to the states, and not to the federal courts, to protect their rights. Isn’t that how we got Jim Crow? Sometimes federal intervention is necessary.
One of the other claims made by Judge Sutton in this section is that states are now defining rights by the standards employed in the federal courts and that the states are in “lockstep” with the federal system, applying its standards and relying on its court decisions. Is that true? I’ve practiced law in New York for nearly forty years and worked as a clerk for two years at a state appellate court. As far as I can tell, there is wide recognition in New York that some state constitutional protections in New York are broader than their federal counterparts and my experience has been that New York appellate decisions rely heavily on precedents of the New York Court of Appeals and the state’s appellate divisions and that federal cases are rarely cited. I’m not a constitutional scholar and can’t speak to what goes on in other states, but the author’s representation is contrary to my experience.
The section on the executive ably contrasts the federal system’s “unitary executive,” as opposed to state systems where there are separate elections for governor and other state officials, such as attorneys general, and then quickly is turned to a lengthy discussion of the role of administrative agencies. Judge Sutton does a good job of explaining why many citizens and judges object to agencies having the power to adjudicate matters and to interpret statutes on the grounds of the non-delegation doctrine and the doctrine of the separation of powers. He then launches into a sustained attack on the Chevron doctrine, which, at the time of the book’s publication, was still binding Supreme Court precedent. Judge Sutton gets a little cheeky here, warning the Supreme Court that judges who opposed the doctrine would find ways around it, or simply ignore it, to decide cases the way that they want. Fortunately, there was no confrontation with the Supremes, who dutifully struck down Chevron at the next convenient opportunity.
You might think that a conservative like Judge Sutton would be disturbed by courts overruling prior decisions, a frequent occurrence at the Supreme Court these days. After all, isn’t stare decisis a foundational concept in the American legal system, insuring stability in the courts and enhancing their credibility? Au contraire. He likes getting rid of old cases “wrongfully decided” by previous, less wise, judges who undoubtedly were misled by “special interests.” But aren’t judges activists when they overrule precedent to impose their policy preferences, like abortion bans and an AR15 in the hands of everyone, whether mentally ill or not? No, no, no. The author cites fellow Judge Douglas Ginsburg’s observation that such judicial overrulings are correctives of previous, passive judges who allowed “liberal norms” to predominate. Judge Ginsburg is a professor at, you guessed it, the Antonin S. Scalia Law School at George Mason University. By the way, the judge most frequently cited in this book is Justice Scalia.
Judge Sutton expresses concerns about the “liberty” that is infringed when one is subjected to administrative regulation, an interesting contrast to his lack of concern for the liberty interests of persons seeking to control family planning decisions or choose a compatible spouse. He also darkly warns us about the “interest groups” (unidentified) who are the bad people advocating administrative regulation. You mean, like environmental groups and citizens groups who don’t want corporations to poison their drinking water and pollute their air? Left unmentioned is the fact that the entire attack on Chevron has been orchestrated by corporate polluters who don’t want to be regulated. But they apparently are not “interest groups.”
The section on the legislative branch gets off to a slow start, as Judge Sutton spends a lot of time lecturing us about state laws that require that proposed laws have clear titles, address only a single subject, and, in the case of proposals to spend money, do so for a public purpose. None of these is a scintillating legal issue, but the point of the discussion of lawsuits arising from alleged violations of these principles is to demonstrate that some issues are “political questions” beyond the power of courts to adjudicate. This leads us to the issue of partisan gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court found beyond its power to correct, a decision with which Judge Sutton agrees. He is right that these issues are complicated, especially when one considers requirements imposed by prior Supreme Court decisions such as Baker v Carr and the Voting Rights Act. But should we just throw up our hands and give up? Apparently so. Judge Sutton suggests that the impetus for change should come from citizens, who should pressure their legislators to outlaw the practice or establish non-partisan commissions to draw district lines. There is a lot of appeal to these suggestions. But what do we do when some states draw lines fairly and others don’t, thereby favoring one party over another? Isn’t that a national problem that requires a national solution?
There is a lot of merit to Judge Sutton’s suggestion that citizens should not place too much reliance on federal courts to protect their rights. Though many national issues require comprehensive solutions, one must consider the makeup of the courts. With the courts packed with partisan actors, citizens may well have a better chance of prevailing in a state court. It’s a pretty good argument for either having judges subject to elections or term limits, suggestions that Judge Sutton finds to have some merit.
The book’s final section draws some interesting contrasts between constitutions that are too easy to amend (many state constitutions) and another that is too hard to amend (the US Constitution). With his evident enthusiasm for state constitutions, Judge Sutton had pretty much convinced me that the US Constitution is horribly outdated and unworkable, requiring radical change to get rid of anti-democratic vestiges of the distant past, like the Electoral College and the awarding of two Senate seats to each state, no matter how large or small. But the only suggestion that he made was a possible change to allow an amendment to take effect if it is ratified by two thirds of the states, rather than the present three quarters. What is more significant in this section is his proposal to eliminate “judicial amendment” of the Constitution. He suggests a bottom-up approach, where a right would have to be established at the local level, then adopted at the state level, then adopted by the number of states required to ratify an amendment before a court at the federal level could consider recognizing that right. In other words, unless it’s a slam dunk that the right would be recognized by the adoption of a constitutional amendment, a court couldn’t recognize it. If this was the view throughout history, how would it have worked? Would there be a Brown v Board of Education? What about Griswold, Roe, Obergefell, Miranda? It sounds like Judge Sutton would leave us stuck in the 18th century, with very little prospect of getting out of it.
Judge Sutton suggests that the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend, because the people “want it that way.” I question this, based on the evidence supplied in the book. When the opportunity to amend has been presented in the states, the people have eagerly embraced it. Thousands of amendments have been adopted. Why wouldn’t they react the same way when it comes to the US Constitution? Judge Sutton suggests that certain measures widely used in the states, such as voter initiatives and referendums, “wouldn’t work” at the federal level, but he presents no reasons why. He also points out that the states are much more democratic than the federal government. But then he says that there can be “too much democracy.” Sounds like the view of someone trying to justify a system where a well-off minority rules the rest of us on an authoritarian basis.
I applaud Judge Sutton for this comprehensive study, though I disagree with his selectivity and many of his conclusions. The book is very dense and difficult to get through. But people should be thinking about, discussing and debating these issues.
November 16, 2022
It's a bit detailed, but a good read to learn what I did not know about the US and all the State Constitutions.
Helps you to see the value of having people in the states decide how they want to live and not 9 judges who were not elected and really not supposed to be making laws. They were to decide if a law was in keeping with the constitution.
Helps you to see the value of having people in the states decide how they want to live and not 9 judges who were not elected and really not supposed to be making laws. They were to decide if a law was in keeping with the constitution.
November 20, 2022
Too specific for my level of understanding. I’m told this book is intended for a more specific audience than the general public (me).
I skimmed most of the book and did gain a wider appreciation of how state vs federal law works and the beauty of the national government being able to take advantage of the knowledge gained through state experience.
I skimmed most of the book and did gain a wider appreciation of how state vs federal law works and the beauty of the national government being able to take advantage of the knowledge gained through state experience.
December 14, 2022
A very interesting and engaging book about the interplay between federal and state constitutional law and its effect on administrative law. It also discusses the role of democracy in structuring governmental institutions. Good stuff.
July 28, 2023
Couldn't finish the book. I'm interested in history and how the constitution was developed which this book focuses on but it was too heavy. I just couldn't force myself to complete it.
August 20, 2023
A far-reaching and thorough argument for better engagement with state and local governments as engines of change and progress.
June 20, 2023
Thorough book on Constitutions
If you want a discussion of US constitutions (51+) this book is for you. Great analysis of who makes the decision.
If you want a discussion of US constitutions (51+) this book is for you. Great analysis of who makes the decision.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews