AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS AND SELECTED CASES (14th ed)

Vol. 16 No. 6 (June, 2006) pp.508-509

AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS AND SELECTED CASES (14^th ed), by Alpheus Thomas Mason and Donald Grier Stephenson, Jr. Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005. 744pp. Cloth. $105.20. ISBN: 0-13-117437-1.

Reviewed by Christopher Malone, Department of Political Science, Pace University. Email: cmalone [at] pace.edu.

Professors are forever searching for the most updated texts and related materials for courses that are reliable and easily accessible; book publishers are forever seeking to supply them. Supply and Demand – the joys of the market. But perhaps like many colleagues all over the country, I plead guilty to the crime of “brand loyalty:” once I find a good, solid, and durable text from a publisher that I like, I stick with it through many editions until either a new one is no longer issued or some other publishing rep peels me away with a better product. Until that moment arrives, my rep usually knows whom to call when the latest edition of my standard texts come out.

I have taught Constitutional Law courses for nearly 10 years. Finding a text in this field which students will not find as dry as dirt is a task in and of itself. In that time, I have gone through about three or four updated editions of Mason’s and Stephenson’s AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS AND SELECTED CASES. But the text has a longer more illustrious history. The first edition appeared in 1954 – the same year BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION was decided. The Fourteenth Edition was released just after its fiftieth anniversary. To put it bluntly and rather crudely, this is a good product for any professor who is teaching introductory courses on the American legal system. It is accessible, thorough, unique in its approach, and timely given the updated material in the concluding chapter on freedom and security during wartime.

The text covers the waterfront of the American legal system in all of its basics: judicial review, organization of the court system, federalism, separation of powers, elections, commerce, criminal justice, property rights, the Bill of Rights, equal protection, and so on. In that sense, the text is solid. Yet what makes AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW unique is the way the authors approach the subject matter. They mercifully refrain from overwhelming readers with long and lengthy chapters – or rather, long and lengthy discourses before the relevant cases are presented. This is why Mason and Stephenson subtitle the text “introductory essays and selected cases.” The background and contextual material in each chapter rarely exceeds 15 pages. The facts and nothing but the bare bone facts are presented before the selected cases are brought forth.

This frees up a good deal of space in each chapter for a wide variety of excerpted cases that address different aspects of the issue in question. For example, in Chapter Fourteen on Equal [*509] Protection, the authors delve into no less than six aspects of equal protection – suspect classification, racial discrimination, state action, gender discrimination, affirmative action, and cases dealing with an analysis of fundamental rights. The “essay” part of the chapter is roughly fifteen pages; the “selected cases” section barely twice that. In short, the chapters are manageable for undergraduate students who may be coming at this material for the very first time.

The text is framed nicely by the introductory and concluding chapters. The former is titled “A Political Supreme Court;” the latter “Security and Freedom in Wartime.” The thread that runs from beginning to end is not necessarily a new revelation, but in these times worth remembering: the courts are never divorced from politics no matter how hard they try. Not when George Washington was making his nominations to the first Supreme Court, and certainly not when the Court was deciding HAMDI amidst the Bush Administration’s pursuit of the war on terror in 2003.

HAMDI is addressed in the last chapter on freedom and security in wartime. The authors frame the argument within a discussion of the fragility of civil liberties and the USA PATRIOT Act. In a way, the chapter loops back and pulls together much of the material contained in previous chapters – issues of civil liberties, right to privacy, the power of the executive vis-à-vis the Congress and the American public, equal protection of the laws, and so on. And yet, underneath all of this lies the core unifying principle Mason and Stephenson seek to advance, which is to say that no matter how hard the courts try to divorce themselves from the political world, they consistently find themselves at the center of it.

For students, this is a lesson worth learning. Professors of political science teaching constitutional law who seek to convey this message will find AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW a trusted companion.

CASE REFERENCES:

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

HAMDI v. RUMSFELD, 124 S.CT. 2633 (2004).

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