The Bill of Rights: Government Proscribed (Perspectives on the American Revolution) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081391759X ISBN 13: 9780813917597

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 1998

Synopsis

This collection sets the Bill of Rights in context by tracing its historical lineage and examines how particular functional dimensions of the various rights were popularly conceived. The volume concludes with a comparative examination of American and French experiences with bills of rights.

About this title

About the Author

Ronald Hoffman is the Director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture. He is the author of A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics and the Revolution in Maryland. Peter J. Albert is coeditory of the Samuel Gompers Papers at the University of Maryland, College Park.

From the Back Cover

As Scholars Have Long Recognized, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution - the Bill of Rights - resulted from the political negotiations that transpired in the various state ratifying conventions called to approve or reject the draft produced by the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The tenacious opposition that had marked many of the convention's deliberations quickly carried over into the states where Antifederalists, convinced that the proposed new form of government posed insidious dangers to the people and the states, insisted that its powers be sharply proscribed. The Bill of Rights that ultimately emerged from this process of accommodation and compromise has frequently been invoked as the republic's essential foundation of individual liberty. The opening essays in this collection by Lois G. Schwoerer, Donald S. Lutz, and Kenneth R. Bowling set the Bill of Rights in context by tracing its historical lineages and establishing the political context for its adoption by the states. Paul Finkelman sees the differences between Federalist fears of anarchy and Antifederalist fears of tyranny as eventually reconcilable, while Saul Cornell and Whitman H. Ridgway examine how particular functional dimensions of the various rights were popularly conceived. Michael Lienesch finds a major significance of the Bill of Rights to have been the enhanced credibility it afforded the new governing authority. Akhil Reed Amar goes beyond that conclusion and argues for the amendments' having important organizational and governing consequences, a position that Forrest McDonald rejects as not borne out by the subsequent history of the United States. Bernard Schwartz concludes the volumewith a comparative examination of the American and French experiences with bills of rights that supports those scholars who argue for the critical role played by the Constitution's first amendments in matters of constitutional jurisprudence.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081391759X
• ISBN 13: 9780813917597
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 463
• Editor: Hoffman Ronald, Albert Peter J.