The Constitution and Race

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This volume examines the manner in which constitutional jurisprudence concerning race has prioritized, developed, and remained unsatisfactory in its response to racial equality and civil rights issues from the time of the Constitutional Convention to the present day. Discussed and examined are the issues of slavery, civil rights, voting rights, segregation and fairness in education, housing, law enforcement. Donald E. Lively gives an analysis of the Supreme Court's response to society's ambiguities, concerns, and conscience in the matters of race. The winning of rights has been a struggle and is far from over as the resistance to affirmative action in the present environment demonstrates. The work is a review and analysis of America's constitutional and judicial history in matters of race. The nation's enduring ambivalence and the price it pays in less than consistent constitutional interpretations on racial questions is both enlightening and disturbing. The questions, of course, are at the heart of a democracy and involve personhood, citizenship, liberty, and equality. "The Constitution and Race" should be valuable to political scientists, historians, sociologists, lawyers and students.

Reviews

"Lively has written an incredibly comprehensive yet concise political and legal history of race and the US Constitution. Ranging through the compromises on race at the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise, the infamous Dred Scott and Plessy cases to Brown and the most recent Supreme Court retrenchments on civil rights, Lively analyzes the "history of doctrinal potential and incomplete actualization" which is civil rights in the US. If the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a coming together of Congress and the courts in the name of civil rights, the last 15 years have seen a reversal of fortune as a result of greater public opposition and court-interpreted constitutional doctrines that are cramped and ill-suited to modern forms of discrimination. Throughout, Lively finds that remedies are consistently "implemented in terms that accommodate majoritarian priorities" and have resulted in the bizarre situation that "the harshest standard of [constitutional] review . . . has been reserved primarily for constitutional claims by the dominant racial group." The author proposes a "jurisprudence of original design" which would use a sliding scale of scrutiny such that remedial actions are examined less strictly than those that continue racial inequality and injustice. Extensive endnotes and bibliography make this work a must for libraries of all types."-Choice
Lively has written an incredibly comprehensive yet concise political and legal history of race and the US Constitution. Ranging through the compromises on race at the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise, the infamous Dred Scott and Plessy cases to Brown and the most recent Supreme Court retrenchments on civil rights, Lively analyzes the "history of doctrinal potential and incomplete actualization" which is civil rights in the US. If the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a coming together of Congress and the courts in the name of civil rights, the last 15 years have seen a reversal of fortune as a result of greater public opposition and court-interpreted constitutional doctrines that are cramped and ill-suited to modern forms of discrimination. Throughout, Lively finds that remedies are consistently "implemented in terms that accommodate majoritarian priorities" and have resulted in the bizarre situation that "the harshest standard of [constitutional] review . . . has been reserved primarily for constitutional claims by the dominant racial group." The author proposes a "jurisprudence of original design" which would use a sliding scale of scrutiny such that remedial actions are examined less strictly than those that continue racial inequality and injustice. Extensive endnotes and bibliography make this work a must for libraries of all types.-Choice

Author Bio

DONALD E. LIVELY is a Professor of Law at the University of Toledo College of Law. He is the author of Modern Communications Law (Praeger, 1991) and Essential Principles of Communications Law (Praeger, 1991).