A New York Times Notable Book This remarkable work offers a fresh approach to a freedom that is often taken for granted in the United States, yet is one of the strongest and proudest elements of American culture: religious freedom. In this compellingly written, distinctively personal book, Judge John T. Noonan asserts that freedom of religion, as James Madison conceived it, is an American invention previously unknown to any nation on earth. The Lustre of Our Country demonstrates how the idea of religious liberty is central to the American experience and to American influence around the world. Noonan's original book is a history of the idea of religious liberty and its relationship with the law. He begins with an intellectual autobiography, describing his own religious and legal training. After setting the stage with autobiography, Noonan turns to history, with each chapter written in a new voice. One chapter takes the form of a catechism (questions and answers), presenting the history of the idea of religious freedom in Christianity and the American colonies. Another chapter on James Madison argues that Madison's support of religious freedom was not purely secular but rather the outcome of his own religious beliefs. A fictional sister of Alexis de Toqueville writes, contrary to her brother's work, that the U.S. government is very closely tied to religion. Other chapters offer straightforward considerations of constitutional law. Throughout the book, Noonan shows how the free exercise of religion led to profound changes in American law—he discusses abolition, temperance, and civil rights—and how the legal notion of religious liberty influenced revolutionary France, Japan, and Russia, as well as the Catholic Church during Vatican II. The Lustre of Our Country is a celebration of religious freedom—a personal and profound statement on what the author considers America's greatest moral contribution to the world.
Narrowing the Nation's Power is the tale of how a cohesive majority of the Supreme Court has, in the last six years, cut back the power of Congress and enhanced the autonomy of the fifty states. The immunity from suit of the sovereign, Blackstone taught, is necessary to preserve the people's idea that the sovereign is "a superior being." Promoting the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity to constitutional status, the current Supreme Court has used it to shield the states from damages for age discrimination, disability discrimination, and the violation of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and fair labor standards. Not just the states themselves, but every state-sponsored entity--a state insurance scheme, a state university's research lab, the Idaho Potato Commission—has been insulated from paying damages in tort or contract. Sovereign immunity, as Noonan puts it, has metastasized. "It only hurts when you think about it," Noonan's Yalewoman remarks. Crippled by the states' immunity, Congress has been further brought to heel by the Supreme Court's recent invention of two rules. The first rule: Congress must establish a documentary record that a national evil exists before Congress can legislate to protect life, liberty, or property under the Fourteenth Amendment. The second rule: The response of Congress to the evil must then be both "congruent" and "proportionate." The Supreme Court determines whether these standards are met, thereby making itself the master monitor of national legislation. Even legislation under the Commerce Clause has been found wanting, illustrated here by the story of Christy Brzonkala's attempt to redress multiple rapes at a state university by invoking the Violence Against Women Act. The nation's power has been remarkably narrowed. Noonan is a passionate believer in the place of persons in the law. Rules, he claims, are a necessary framework, but they must not obscure law's task of giving justice to persons. His critique of Supreme Court doctrine is driven by this conviction.
Traces the history of bribery from ancient Egypt to ABSCAM, examines changing perceptions of bribery, and discusses the legal, ethical and religious injunctions against bribes
Noonan discusses how the concept of property, applied to a person, is a perfect mask since no trace of human identity remains. An auction of slaves in Virginia, the takeover of a banana plantation in Costa Rica, and an accident on the Long Island Railroad are the famous cases involving these four legal giants. The stories of the litigations at three different periods of our history provide a powerful analysis of American law. Breaking through the formalism in which jurisprudence is often enshrined, Noonan offers a compelling vision of law and a potent call for reform in the education and behavior of lawyers."--BOOK JACKET.
Originally published in 1965, Contraception received unanimous acclaim from all quarters as the first thorough, scholarly, objective analysis of Catholic doctrine on birth control. More than ever this subject is of acute concern to a world facing serious population problems, and the author has written an important new appendix examining the development of and debates over the doctrine in the past twenty years.
NEW INSIGHT INTO SHAKESPEARE'S SONNET SEQUENCE Berkeley's John Noonan presents the case for a new reading of 22 of Shakespeare's Sonnets Berkeley, California. John T. Noonan, Jr., U.C. Berkeley professor and federal judge, is the author of Shakespeare's Spiritual Sonnets just published by Amazon. Noonan presents argument and analysis of the Sonnets pointing to addressees of these poems far from the usual suspects. His candidates include God, the Virgin Mary, Mother Church, and Jesuit missionaries to England. He himself acknowledges his own reluctance to believe that the Bard was "mixed up with Jesuits." Imagine for a moment discovering new poems by Shakespeare. Noonan discards the assumption that the Sonnets reflect the course of two or more love affairs. Observing that it is generally agreed that some of the Sonnets are commissioned work urging a young man to marry, and that two sonnets are addressed to the poet's soul, he argues that each of the remaining sonnets should be examined in terms of its particular purpose and addressee. His analysis is both negative, pointing to substantial difficulties and gaps in the standard approach, and positive, showing the probability of a different reading. Not by Euclidean logic, he writes, but by a convergence of probabilities is the case made. Noonan's interpretation sets the 22 sonnets firmly in the context of religious controversy and compelled conformity in Queen Elizabeth's Britain and in the larger context of continental currents of theology. Shakespeare, Noonan notes, was a man of his time, and the time extends back to Pope Gregory's dispatch of missionaries to England a thousand years earlier. Noonan offers a spectrum within which he suggests that Shakespeare fits. At one end is William Byrd, composer for Queen Elizabeth and composer of masses and motets for the Catholic underground. At the other end of the spectrum is Robert Southwell, S.J., sought, caught, and hung as a priest criminally present in the country. Between them, Noonan places Shakespeare, who borrowed ideas and inspiration from Southwell's poems and who emulated Byrd in his ability to please the queen and to enhearten his own disfavored community. Noonan's book is likely to lead many lovers of Shakespeare to look at the Sonnets afresh.
Provides detailed information on professional and personal responsibilities of the lawyer. Also provides the tools for fast, easy, on-point study. Part of the University Casebook Seriesо, it includes selected cases designed to illustrate the development of a body of law on a particular subject. Text and explanatory materials designed for law study accompany the cases.
The Lustre of Our Country demonstrates how the idea of religious freedom is central to the American experience and to American influence on religion around the world.
In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times? Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception. Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.
A brilliant book, which brings historical analysis of religion in American culture to a new level of insight and importance." —New York Times Book Review Catholicism and American Freedom is a groundbreaking historical account of the tensions (and occasional alliances) between Catholic and American understandings of a healthy society and the individual person, including dramatic conflicts over issues such as slavery, public education, economic reform, the movies, contraception, and abortion. Putting scandals in the Church and the media's response in a much larger context, this stimulating history is a model of nuanced scholarship and provocative reading.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when asked at a press conference about the roots of his political philosophy, responded simply, “I am a Christian and a Democrat.” This is the story of how the first informed the second—how his upbringing in the Episcopal Church and matriculation at the Groton School under legendary educator and minister Endicott Peabody molded Roosevelt into a leader whose politics were fundamentally shaped by the Social Gospel. A work begun by religious historian John Woolverton (1926 2014) and recently completed by James Bratt, A Christian and a Democrat is an engaging analysis of the surprisingly spiritual life of one of the most consequential presidents in US history. Reading Woolverton’s account of FDR’s response to the toxic demagoguery of his day will reassure readers today that a constructive way forward is possible for Christians, for Americans, and for the world.
Originally published in 1965, Contraception received unanimous acclaim from all quarters as the first thorough, scholarly, objective analysis of Catholic doctrine on birth control. More than ever this subject is of acute concern to a world facing serious population problems, and the author has written an important new appendix examining the development of and debates over the doctrine in the past twenty years.
Traces the history of bribery from ancient Egypt to ABSCAM, examines changing perceptions of bribery, and discusses the legal, ethical and religious injunctions against bribes
One of the most successful volumes in its field over the last 20 years, "Philosophy and Contemporary Issues" introduces today's readers to philosophy with timely, approachable readings of philosophical significance. The authors strive to demonstrate how philosophy illuminates and helps solve some of the important problems facing contemporary man, and they encourage readers to engage in philosophizing themselves. This book successfully makes the subject interesting and intelligible for readers encountering philosophy for the first time. Essays address freedom and determinism, morality and society, state and society, and knowledge and science. For individuals interested in an accessible introduction to philosophy.
Noonan discusses how the concept of property, applied to a person, is a perfect mask since no trace of human identity remains. An auction of slaves in Virginia, the takeover of a banana plantation in Costa Rica, and an accident on the Long Island Railroad are the famous cases involving these four legal giants. The stories of the litigations at three different periods of our history provide a powerful analysis of American law. Breaking through the formalism in which jurisprudence is often enshrined, Noonan offers a compelling vision of law and a potent call for reform in the education and behavior of lawyers."--BOOK JACKET.
Leading legal scholar John Witte, Jr. explores the role religion played in the development of rights in the Western legal tradition and traces the complex interplay between human rights and religious freedom norms in modern domestic and international law. He examines how US courts are moving towards greater religious freedom, while recent decisions of the pan-European courts in Strasbourg and Luxembourg have harmed new religious minorities and threatened old religious traditions in Europe. Witte argues that the robust promotion and protection of religious freedom is the best way to protect many other fundamental rights today, even though religious freedom and other fundamental rights sometimes clash and need judicious balancing. He also responds to various modern critics who see human rights as a betrayal of Christianity and religious freedom as a betrayal of human rights.
The slave ship Antelope, carrying 280 Africans in chains, was intercepted near St. Augustine in June, 1820, by a U.S. Treasury cutter and for eight years the American courts discussed the status and disposition of its "cargo." Championed on appeal by lawyer Francis Scott Key, the Africans were the object of a tortured decision by Chief Justice John Marshall, freeing some to become early settlers of Liberia and leaving others to become the slaves of a Georgia Congressman. John Noonan examines the eight-year dispute in his consideration of the relationship between law and moral obligation. Students of American and African-American history and legal history will welcome the close analysis of this nearly forgotten event and the light it sheds on attitudes towards slavery in the U.S. -- from back cover.
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