CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICES

Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Very Good- in Very Good- dust jacket. 1985. First Edition; Second Printing. Hardcover. xiv, (2), 474 pages; Complete and secure in original red cloth binding in edgeworn dustjacket with some shallow creases. Former owner's name on ffep and some scattered pencil marks at margin. From the DJ flap: Constitutional Choices illuminates the world of scholarship and advocacy uniquely combined by Laurence Tribe, one of the nation's leading professors of constitutional law and most successful practitioners before the Supreme Court. In his new hook, Tribe boldly moves beyond the seemingly endless debate over which judicial approaches to enforcing the Constitution are "legitimate" and which are not. Arguing that all claims to legitimacy must remain suspect, Tribe focuses instead on the choices that must nonetheless be made in resolving actual constitutional controversies. To do so, he examines problems as diverse as interstate banking, gender discrimination, church subsidies, the constitutional amendment process, the war powers of the President, and First Amendment protection of American Nazis.Challenging the ruling premises underlying many 0f the Supreme Court's positions on fundamental issues of government authority and individual rights, Tribe shows how the Court is increasingly coming to resemble a judicial Office of Management and Budget, straining constitutional discourse through a managerial sieve and defending its constitutional rulings by "balancing'' what it counts as "costs" against what it deems benefits?' Tribe explains how the Court's "Calculus" systematically excludes basic concerns about the distribution of wealth and power and conceals fundamental choices about the American polity. Calling for a more candid confrontation of those choices and of the principles and perspectives they reflect, Tribe exposes what has gone wrong and suggests how the Court can begin to reclaim the historic role entrusted to it by the Constitution. Laurence Henry Tribe (born October 10, 1941) is an American legal scholar who is a University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He previously served as the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School. A constitutional law scholar, Tribe is co-founder of the American Constitution Society. He is also the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a major treatise in that field, and has argued before the United States Supreme Court 36 times. Tribe was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. .