Constitution

About: Constitution is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 37828 publications have been published within this topic receiving 435603 citations.

Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

Abstract: Taking on decades of received scholarly wisdom, David Waldstreicher has written the first book to acknowledge the centrality of slavery to the origins and Language of the U.S. Constitution. Famously, the Constitution never mentions slavery. And yet of its eighty-four clauses, six are directly concerned with slaves and the interests of their owners. Five other clauses had implications for slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the citizens of the states during ratification. Neither a moral blind spot for America's otherwise enlightened framers nor the expression of a mere economic interest, slavery was as important to the making of the Constitution as the Constitution was to the survival of slavery. Slavery indeed was less than six degrees of separation from every major political issue in pre-Civil War America. One reason for this is that slavery was a major aspect of the American economy. The livelihoods of people in the North as well as the South depended on the products of slave labour, on import and export policies, and on the running of related services. Therefore, because the Constitution had economic implications and set the stage for a national economy, it could not avoid having implications for slavery, and creating a constitutional politics of slavery.

Executive-Legislative Relations in an Era of Accelerated Reform: Reshaping Government in Israel

Abstract: Israel's democracy is in the midst of a dramatic and comprehensive restructuring, a so-called "constitutional revolution." Because it lacks a written constitution, Israel turns to its parliament, the Knesset, as both the source and the target of most governmental reforms. As a result of these reforms, the 13th Knesset (1992-96) behaved very differently from its predecessors and changed the existing patterns of executive-legislative interaction. The reshaping of government in Israel presents an institutionally unique and developing political laboratory in which evolving executive-legislative relations can be analyzed while the composition and construction of the regime continues to unfold. This article has three primary aims. I first describe the reforms that were enacted toward the end of the 12th Knesset (1988-92) regarding the two branches of government. Then I analyze the evolving executive-legislative relations in the 13th Knesset. And third, I assess the significance of these changes for the stability and governability of Israeli democracy in general and the 14th Knesset in particular.