"The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated the right to abortion and is revisiting other fundamental questions today--about voting rights, affirmative action, gun laws, and much more. Once-arcane theories of constitutional interpretation are profoundly affecting the lives of all Americans. In this brief and urgent book, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein provides a lively introduction to competing approaches to interpreting the Constitution--and argues that the only way to choose one is to ask whether it would change American life for the better or worse. If a method of interpretation would eliminate the right of privacy, allow racial segregation, or obliterate free speech, it would be unacceptable for that reason. But some Supreme Court justices are committed to 'originalism,' arguing that the meaning of the Constitution is settled by how it was publicly understood when it was ratified. Originalists insist that their approach is dictated by the Constitution. That, Sunstein argues, is a big mistake. The Constitution doesn't contain instructions for its own interpretation. Any approach to constitutional interpretation needs to be defended in terms of its broad effects--what it does to our rights and our institutions. It must respect those rights and institutions--and safeguard the conditions for democracy itself"--

A fascinating and very lucid account of the conflicts, both social and psychological, that permeate the keeping and use of monkeys and apes in American laboratories.

This book was first published in 1980. Walter Ullmann made substantial contributions to many areas of medieval studies, and to those of papal history and cannon law particularly, which have been distinguished by quality and quantity alike. The bibliography of his published work included in this volume contains almost four hundred items. No less influential for generations of students have been his teaching and lecturing, especially at Leeds and from 1949 to 1978 at Cambridge. In Authority and Power friends and former pupils combined to mark his retirement from the Cambridge Chair of Medieval History, with each contributor writing on or near the subject originally studied under Professor Ullmann's supervision. The essays serve both to acknowledge a sense of shared indebtedness to Professor Ullmann and to indicate new approaches and developments, as they were at the time, in legal-historical scholarship. --