The Constitution and Race

Subjects:

• Law » Constitutional Law
• Political Science » Civil/Political/Human Rights
• Multicultural Studies » Black Studies

Awards:

• Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, 1992
• Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 1992

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

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Introduction
• Constitutional Law and Slavery
• Toward a More Perfect Union
• Constitutional Amendment and Doctrinal Development
• Separate But Equal
• Desegregation and the Anti-Discrimination Principle
• Color Blindness Revisited
• Original Imperatives and Doctrinal Possibility
• Bibliography
• Index