A COSMOPOLITAN LAWYER: JUST SOME READINGS I HAVE ENJOYED LATELY

First, this blog replaces my previous blog, thecosmoplitanlawyerblogspot.com . Second, unlike that earlier blog, the present one is primarily meant as a record of my readings. It is not meant to suggest that others will be or should be interested in what I read. And third, in a sense, it is a public diary of one who is an alien in his own American culture. A person who feels at home just about anywhere, except in his birthplace . . . America.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

ASSESSING THE LIKELIHOOD OF AN AMERICAN AUTHORITARIAN STATE

Cass R. Sunstein, ed., Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America (New York: Dey St./William Morrow, 2018) (This collection of essays, from a wide range of social, political, legal. etc., commentators and writers, are accessible and worth the investment. Were I forced to pick one passage which best captures the overall gist of this collection it would be from Tom Ginsburg & Aziz Huq, "How We Lost Constitutional Democracy":

So could it happen here? Looking to these recent examples suggests that the US Constitution may be good at checking coups or the antidemocratic deployment of emergency powers, but it is not well suited to stall the slow decay of democracy. Our eighteenth-century Constitution singular lacks the provisions necessary to slow down a would-be autocrat bent on the slow dismantling of democracy.

Id. at 135, 151.