“To Save the People from Themselves”: The Emergence of American Judicial Review and the Transformation of Constitutions (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society) - Softcover

Steinfeld, Robert J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1108984592 ISBN 13: 9781108984591

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2023

Synopsis

In this expansive history, Robert J. Steinfeld offers a thorough re-interpretation of the origins of American judicial review and the central role it quickly came to play in the American constitutional system. Beginning with Privy Council review of American colonial legislation, the book goes on to provide detailed descriptions of the character of the first American constitutions, showing that they drew heavily on traditional Anglo/American constitutional assumptions, which treated legislatures as the primary interpreters of constitutions. Steinfeld then expertly analyses the central role lawyers and judges played in transforming these assumptions, creating the practice and doctrine of American judicial review in a half dozen state cases during the 1780s. The book concludes by showing that the ideas formulated during those years shaped critical decisions taken by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which turned the novel practice into a permanent, if still deeply controversial, feature of the American constitutional system.

About this title

About the Author

Robert J. Steinfeld is Professor of Law Emeritus at the SUNY Buffalo School of Law. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108984592
• ISBN 13: 9781108984591
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 452