Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
1990
Publication Information
8 Law & Hist. Rev. 139 (1990) (book review).
Abstract
Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk. Jacksonian Democracy, States Rights and the Nullification Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xi, 279. $32.50 (ISBN: 0-19-503785-5).
From the Review
In a widely reported address at Tulane University in October 1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese chastised the Supreme Court for its habitual conflation of constitutional law and the Constitution.
Meese is no intellectual, and his remarks were not intended as academic musings; thus, the speech may have been appropriately judged from a political perspective, condemned by liberals and applauded by conservatives for roughly the same reasons. Unfortunately obscured by the speaker's controversial status, however, is the intellectual respectability of the words spoken. One of the virtues of Richard E. Ellis's The Union at Risk is his successful recovery and presentation of the tradition in which the Tulane speech stands, that of "pluralism."
Recommended Citation
Gerard V. Bradley,
The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States Rights and the Nullification Crisis,
8 Law & Hist. Rev. 139 (1990) (book review)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1868