The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review

In this groundbreaking interpretation of America's founding and of its entire system of judicial review, Larry Kramer reveals that the colonists fought for and created a very different system--and held a very different understanding of citizenship--than Americans believe to be the norm today. "Popular sovereignty" was not just some historical abstraction, and the notion of "the people" was more than a flip rhetorical device invoked on the campaign trail. Questions of constitutional meaning provoked vigorous public debate and the actions of government officials were greeted with celebratory feasts and bonfires, or riotous resistance. Americans treated the Constitution as part of the lived reality of their daily existence. Their self-sovereignty in law as much as politics was active not abstract.

• Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
• Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts
• Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (Barnes & Noble Classics)
• Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (Princeton Studies in ... International, and Comparative Perspectives)
• The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics
• Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification
• The Revolutionary Constitution
• Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism
• The Living Constitution (INALIENABLE RIGHTS)
• The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction