What Kind of Nation or Code

What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States

Author: James F Simon

The bitter and protracted struggle between President Thomas Jefferson and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall defined the basic constitutional relationship between the executive and judicial branches of government. More than one hundred fifty years later, their clashes still reverberate in constitutional debates and political battles.

In this dramatic and fully accessible account of these titans of the early republic and their fiercely held ideas, James F. Simon brings to life the early history of the nation and sheds new light on the highly charged battle to balance the powers of the federal government and the rights of the states. A fascinating look at two of the nation's greatest statesmen and shrewdest politicians, What Kind of Nation presents a cogent, unbiased assessment of their lasting impact on American government.

Publishers Weekly

Simon (a former Time editor, now a law professor at NYU) examines the decades of conflict between the states' rights views of Thomas Jefferson and the federalist beliefs of John Marshall. In 1801, at the end of Adams's presidency, Marshall accepted the Supreme Court chief justice's position and Jefferson became the nation's third president. That set the stage for years of competition between the two philosophies of government, especially the two visions of the judiciary, represented by the principal antagonists of Simon's history. Simon deftly explains how Jefferson and Marshall maintained a faeade of civility in their public pronouncements while unleashing blistering mutual vituperation privately. Ultimately, as Simon demonstrates, Marshall prevailed. His technique was subtlety itself. In his opinion in Marbury v. Madison, Marshall gave an ostensible victory to Madison (Jefferson's vice president) but reached that result by asserting the authority of the Supreme Court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. That assertion had far-reaching implications for consolidating the federal government's power. Once the Supreme Court became the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution, the court repeatedly exercised its authority to invalidate state laws and court decisions inconsistent with the federal Constitution. Simon usefully narrows his focus to a handful of key decisions by the Marshall court, showing how the justice's concept of what kind of nation the U.S. should be progressively swept aside Jefferson's belief that state and federal governments were equal sovereigns. Simon's book illuminates the origins of a national political debate that continues today. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

With John Adams ever so popular right now, why not take a look at what some of his contemporaries were doing to "create a United States"? Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

From NYU law professor Simon: a lucid account of the clash between two strong-willed men and two sharply divergent political tendencies. Jefferson, writes Simon (The Center Holds: The Power Struggle Inside the Rehnquist Court, 1995; Law/NYU), had a profound distrust for centralized authority, be it king or Congress, and a nagging suspicion that "the Constitution was an invitation to monarchy." To counter the growing power of the Federalists, he organized the Democratic-Republican Party and set about vigorously protesting such legislation as the Jay Treaty of 1794 and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. (Though he believed the second law gave too much power to the federal government, Simon notes, Jefferson "did not object to selective prosecutions of his political critics under state seditious libel laws.") Jefferson reserved special contempt for his chief Federalist bugaboo, fellow Virginian John Marshall, whom he derided for "acting under the mask of Republicanism" and exhibiting "lax lounging manners." As legislator and later as Supreme Court justice, Marshall would repay the compliment by contesting Jefferson at every turn, suspecting that he sought to weaken the power of the federal government and especially the executive in order to increase his personal power. Marshall's opposition came perhaps nowhere more forcibly than in his formulation of the federal judiciary's decision in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, which ruled that the court alone was responsible for determining what was or was not constitutional and could strike down congressional legislation and executive orders on constitutional grounds. Simon notes that the debate between the two political philosophies, arrayingstates' rights on one hand and federal power on the other, has been a constant in American political history, though, as he writes, the uses to which Jefferson's states'-rights arguments have been put "would probably have appalled the nation's third president." Simon's excellent venture in legal and political history illuminates both the roots of an ongoing controversy and the characters of two great historic figures.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue	15
1.	"Swindling Propositions"	39
2.	"The Reign of Witches"	49
3.	A Sense of Duty	63
4.	Defending the President	85
5.	Prelude to a Revolution	104
6.	"The Fangs of Jefferson"	118
7.	"The Least Dangerous" Branch	138
8.	Mr. Marbury's Missing Commission	173
9.	A "Bungling Way" to Remove Judges	191
10.	Treason Against the United States	220
11.	Final Battles	260
	Epilogue	292
	Source Notes	303
	Acknowledgments	327
	Index	329

Book about: Microsoft Office 2007 Illustrated Introductory Windows Vista Edition or Adobe Photoshop CS Classroom in a Book

Code: Version 2.0

Author: Lawrence Lessig

Should cyberspace be regulated? How can it be done? It's a cherished belief of techies and net denizens everywhere that cyberspace is fundamentally impossible to regulate. Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig warns that, if we're not careful we'll wake up one day to discover that the character of cyberspace has changed from under us. Cyberspace will no longer be a world of relative freedom; instead it will be a world of perfect control where our identities, actions, and desires are monitored, tracked, and analyzed for the latest market research report. Commercial forces will dictate the change, and architecture—the very structure of cyberspace itself—will dictate the form our interactions can and cannot take.

Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace is an exciting examination of how the core values of cyberspace as we know it—intellectual property, free speech, and privacy-—are being threatened and what we can do to protect them. Lessig shows how code—the architecture and law of cyberspace—can make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how technological architectures influence people's behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code can have damaging consequences for individual freedoms. Code is not just for lawyers and policymakers; it is a must-read for everyone concerned with survival of democratic values in the Information Age.

Harvard Business Review - Carl Shapiro

Code and Other Laws of CyberspaceLawrence Lessig makes the case that important gains in liberty promoted by the Internet, such as freedom of speech, are now at risk. Code is both mind expanding and entertaining.

Baltimore Sun - Michael Himowitz

[T]his brilliant, scholarly but eminently readable examination of the laws, rules and customs that govern the Internet should be required reading for anyone who spends more than a few minutes a week online.

Philip Y. Blue - Library Journal

Code, Lessig's seminal examination of the interrelationships among the Internet, privacy, and intellectual property, was published in 2000. It invigorated scholars of constitutional law with a fresh perspective on the nature, level, and extent of technology's reach into the realm of jurisprudence. Now this work has been collaboratively revised: Lessig (founder, Ctr. for the Internet & Society, Stanford Univ. Law Sch.; The Future of Ideas) and his readers call the shots alongside one another, with readers editing the original text via the author's wiki. The thesis of 2.0remains essentially the same: the Internet's infrastructure will become increasingly controlled and regulable through digital identity technologies, enabling a partnership between government and commerce that will shape the characteristics and determine the boundaries of cyberspace in a manner favorable to these two powerful forces of social order. Drawing upon and expanding the works of first-generation cyberspace theorists, Lessig foresees an extension of control and regulation that cybernauts of the 1990s would have found Orwellian. He also delineates the legal and ethical values inherent within three major categories increasingly under assault by the nontraditional vagaries of cyberspace: privacy protection, free speech, and intellectual property rights. His solution here is the creation of a creative or intellectual Commons, a resource that anyone within a relevant community can use without seeking the permission of anyone else. Highly recommended for academic libraries and legal collections.

Basic Books

"Lessig's exposition reads like a Stanley Kubrick film, with the menace made palpable by new technologies…It is a troubling book, and one that needs to be taken seriously."
-- Daniel Bell, author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

"This may be the most important book ever published about the Internet, as well as one of the most readable. Lessig's ideas are deep and insightful, and they will shape the way the future develops. He is a master at seeing the important ideas lurking behind things we all take for granted."
--Mark A. Lemley, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkley

"Lessig's book is an astonishing achievement. The nation's leading scholar of cyberspace has produced a paradigm-shifting work that will transform the debate about the architecture of cyberspace. Lessig challenges us to make choices about freedom, privacy, intellectual property, and technology that most of us didn't recognize as choices in the first place."
--Jeffrey Rosen, Legal Affairs Editor, The New Republic

The New York Times Book Review - David Pogue

In Code, the Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, freshly famous from his role as friend of the court in the Microsoft antitrust suit, makes an alarming and impassioned claim: that the Internet will indeed soon be regulated. ''Left to itself,'' he says, ''cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control'' -- not by the government, which he characterizes as clueless and inadequate, but by software programmers. In a book that's sometimes as brilliant as the best teacher you ever had, sometimes as pretentious as a deconstructionists' conference, Lessig plays digital Cassandra: he predicts that the Internet will become a monster that tracks our every move, but that nobody will heed his warning.

What People Are Saying

Stewart Brand
From the Author of The Media Lab and The Clock of the Long Now

Lawrence Lessig is a James Madison of our time, crafting the lineaments of a well-tempered cyberspace. This book is a primer of "running code" for digital civilization. Like Madison, Lessig is a model of balance, judgement, ingenuity, and persuasive argument.

Andrew L. Shapiro
From the Author of The Control Revolution

Graceful, provocative, witty, and unpredictable, Code is a masterpiece that neither lawyers nor Internet mavens can keep for themselves. It is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the digital age.

Bruce Ackerman
Code penetrates the cyberfluff to reveal the deep structure of our brave new world.

Mark A. Lemley
This may be the most important book ever published about the Internet, as well as one of the most readable. Lessig's ideas are deep and insightful, and they will shape the way the future develops. He is a master at seeing the important ideas lurking behind things we all take for granted.

Charles Fried
This fascinating and provocative book is a fine introduction to the brave new world of the Internet, to the novel issues it raises, and to the old issues it poses in a new light.

Daniel Bell
From the Author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

Lessig's exposition reads like a Stanley Kubrick film, with the menace made palpable by new technologies....It is a troubling book, and one that needs to be taken seriously.

Jeffrey Rosen
Lessig's book is an astonishing achievement. The nation's leading scholar of cyberspace has produced a paradigm-shifting work that will transform the debate about the architecture of cyberspace. Lessig challenges us to make choices about freedom, privacy, intellectual property, and technology that most of us didn't recognize as choices in the first place. This dark, exhilarating work is the most important book of its generation about the relationship between law, cyberspace, and social organization.

Julian Dibbell
From the Author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World

Larry Lessig has taken an acute insight into the nature of law in and around cyberspace and turned it into a sweeping, powerful, and brilliantly lucid argument. For anyone passionate about securing the freedoms of thought and expression the Internet seems to promise, Code is a book full of challenging and galvanizing heresiesуnot the least of them being Lessig's central insistence that computer code can be just as much a threat to those freedoms as legislative code. This is not just an interesting point; it demands a rethinking of the social contract as radical as any since the days of Locke. And with wit, rigor, and a graceful accessibility, Lessig here proves himself Locke's worthy heir.

Jack M. Balkin
Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Director, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School

In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Larry Lessig compellingly demonstrates the central idea of cyberlaw: Software architecture can regulate our lives as much as any legal rule. This is, quite simply, the best book that has been written on the law of cyberspace.

Julie E. Cohen
Lawrence Lessig exposes the limits of prevailing views about how cyberspace is (and is not) regulated, and makes a compelling case for the urgency of learning to transcend those limits. Code is essential reading for those who care about the future of cyberspace, and of the human society within which "cyberspace" plays an increasingly central role.

William. J. Mitchell
Lawrence Lessig takes seriously the proposition that, in cyberspace, code is the law, and he traces out the consequences in a lucid and insightful way. If you want to know what daily life will be like in the computer-mediated twenty-first century, this is essential reading.