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reading about constitutional law for fun

Date: April 12, 2003 | 9 Safar 1424 Hijriah
Blog: veiled4allah
Subjects: law, issues, books
I've just started reading The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction by Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale. It looks like it's going to be a great read. Amar clearly does not shy away from controversy.

For instance, in his discussion of the First Amendment (the chapter I'm currently reading), Amar argues that the clause Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion was originally understood to mean that Congress could make no laws of any kind regarding religion, neither to establish it, nor to force the states to disestablish it. The regulation of religion was simply outside of Congress's power.

The book also promises to examine how and why this understanding changed, as well as examining the original meaning of other parts of the Bill of Rights. I'm looking forward to seeing what Amar has to say about this.
~ Posted by Al-Muhajabah, a member of the reality-based community, at 07:18 PM

Comments

adnan said: Total comments: 7  

http://www.malcolm-x.org is back up!!!

sorry for the shameless advertising sad

~ Posted at April 12, 2003 09:01 PM | Comment Permalink
Luke said: Total comments: 1  

I thought that the part about not making rules for religion had to do with the bigger idea of separation of church and state - that is that there would be no official state religion as they had in England. Speaking completely from the recesses of my mind, I have some recollection of problems with the state also running a religion, and therefore the boundaries getting blurred. This allowed the state to get away with things under the banner of 'religion' that otherwise they wouldnt. I'm very vague on this so your thoughts or anyone elses would be useful?

~ Posted at April 14, 2003 06:30 PM | Comment Permalink
moderator Al-Munaqabah said: Total comments: 996   gold stargold stargold stargold stargold star

Thanks for visiting, Luke. I tossed that out purely for the purpose of provoking discussion. The author of the book, Akhil Reed Amar, has a lot more to say than that. He also discusses how the understanding of the Establishment Clause has changed since 1791 and how we came to our current understanding.

A useful article about the Establishment Clause is On Rights and Restraints: The Structural Limits of the Establishment Clause.

~ Posted at April 15, 2003 06:47 PM | Comment Permalink

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