San Antonio College Library

"While the Congress literature of the 1970s and 1980s led to the dominant impression that all politics is local, in recent years legislative behavior has pointed in more national directions. Dilemmas of Representation comprehensively examines the multifaceted activities of several legislators from New York, one of the country's most diverse states. Legislators still include strong local components in their home styles, but a variety of national factors...

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...

America's leading constitutional historian presents the first history of states' rights in the United States, surveying the concept's history from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction. McDonald (history, U. of Alabama) explores the balance between general and local authority in government. Tracing the concept of states' rights from the Declaration of Independence to the end of Reconstruction, he illuminates the constitutional,...