Mark Tushnet | |
---|---|
Born | Mark Victor Tushnet 18 November 1945 Newark, New Jersey, U.S. |
Title | William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Emeritus |
Academic background | |
Education | Harvard University (AB) Yale University (MA, JD) |
Influences | Thurgood Marshall |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Constitutional law |
Institutions | University of Wisconsin–Madison Georgetown University Law School Law School Law School Law University Harvard University |
Mark Victor Tushnet (born 18 November 1945) [1] is an American legal scholar. He specializes in constitutional law and theory,including comparative constitutional law,and is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. [2] Tushnet is identified with the critical legal studies movement. [3]
Tushnet is a main proponent of the idea that judicial review should be strongly limited and that the Constitution should be returned "to the people." [4] In 2020,he published a book extending his previous writing about judicial overreach concerning the process of judicial review,which he originally started discussing in his 1999 book on this subject. [5]
In 1967,Tushnet received his A.B. from Harvard College. [6] [7] He later received an M.A. in history from Yale University and his J.D. from the Yale Law School. Tushnet has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison while he taught for many years at the Georgetown University Law Center and has given lectures at Duke University. [8] [9] [10] [11]
Tushnet served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court between 1972 and 1973. [12] In a 1996 congressional hearing on President Bill Clinton's veto of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act,Tushnet testified about his involvement in Roe v. Wade ,the 1973 case that struck down state laws prohibiting abortion. During questioning it was alleged that a memorandum written by Tushnet to Marshall had a significant influence on the outcome of the case. [13] More recently,he commented on the power of the president to pardon himself,composition of the Court,and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. [14] [15] [16] He is also widely quoted in the press as an expert on the First Amendment right to free speech and the scope of presidential powers. [17] [18] [19] In 2016,Tushnet was listed among the ten most frequently cited law professors. [20]
One of the more controversial figures in constitutional theory,he is identified with the critical legal studies movement and once stated in an article that,were he asked to decide actual cases as a judge,he would seek to reach results that would "advance the cause of socialism". [21] Tushnet is a main proponent of the idea that judicial review should be strongly limited and that the Constitution should be returned "to the people." [4] Tushnet is,with Harvard Law Professor Vicki Jackson,the co-author of a casebook entitled Comparative Constitutional Law (Foundation Press,2d ed. 2006).
In 2020,Tushnet published a book extending his previous writing about judicial overreach concerning the process of judicial review,which he originally started discussing in his 1999 book on this subject. [5]
Tushnet is Jewish,and he married his wife Elizabeth Alexander at a Methodist Church. [22] She is currently a Unitarian [23] and formerly directed the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union but now works in private practice. Their daughter Rebecca Tushnet is also a professor of law at Harvard Law School. [24] [25] Their other daughter Eve is a lesbian author and blogger. [26] [23]
Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that established the principle of judicial review in the United States, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes that they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law. The Court's landmark decision established that the U.S. Constitution is actual law, not just a statement of political principles and ideals, and helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the federal government.
Thurgood Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative.
Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H.L.A. Hart. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century. After his death, the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein said Dworkin was "one of the most important legal philosophers of the last 100 years. He may well head the list."
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John Hart Ely was an American legal scholar. He was a professor of law at Yale Law School from 1968 to 1973, Harvard Law School from 1973 to 1982, Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1996, and at the University of Miami Law School from 1996 until his death. From 1982 until 1987, he was the 9th dean of Stanford Law School.
The Warren Court was the period in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States during which Earl Warren served as Chief Justice. Warren replaced the deceased Fred M. Vinson as Chief Justice in 1953, and Warren remained in office until he retired in 1969, at which point he was replaced by Warren Burger. The Warren Court is often considered the most liberal court in US history.
Jack Greenberg was an American attorney and legal scholar. He was the Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1961 to 1984, succeeding Thurgood Marshall. He was involved in numerous crucial cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in public schools. In all, he argued 40 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won almost all of them.
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Erwin Nathaniel Griswold was an American appellate attorney and legal scholar who argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Griswold served as Solicitor General of the United States (1967–1973) under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. He also served as the dean of Harvard Law School for 21 years. Several times he was considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. During a career that spanned more than six decades, he served as member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and as president of the American Bar Foundation.
Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law and a leading expert on constitutional law, the Supreme Court, the system of government in the United States, and legal issues concerning the structure of democracy, including election law. His scholarship focuses on public law and legal issues affecting democracy.
Louis Michael Seidman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., a widely read constitutional law scholar and major proponent of the critical legal studies movement. Seidman's 2012 work is On Constitutional Disobedience, where Seidman challenges the viability of political policy arguments made in reference to constitutional obligation.
Constitutionalism is "a compound of ideas, attitudes, and patterns of behavior elaborating the principle that the authority of government derives from and is limited by a body of fundamental law".
Vicki C. Jackson is the Laurence H. Tribe Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. The New York Times has described her as "an authority on state-federal questions".
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