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From the very beginning of the self-conscious existence of \"The United States,\" the question of pluralism has been central. What, after all, did it mean to assert that those declaring their independence from the British in 1776 were \"one people\"? Why did Publius, writing The Federalist in 1787, emphasize that our \"united people\" was far more similar than the evidence, easily available to him as well as to us, could possibly support? What is the meaning of our national motto, epluribus unumi Puerto Rico is especially useful as a means of examining such questions. The most obvious issues are presented by language, but other factors as well contributed to the unwillingness of the United States, following the Spanish-American War, to treat its consquests as new territories on the way to statehood. Instead, obviously, the Court created the differentiation between \"incorporated\" and \"unincorporated\" territories, with attendant consequences for a host of issues, including whether residents of Puerto Rico would be treated as citizens of the United States with whatever rights attached to that status. From one perspective, this particular problem was resolved, with regard to citizenship, by the Jones Act of 1917. But, as with the statutory grant of citizenship to American Indians in 1924, many questions remained about the actual rights that would be enjoyed by Puerto Ricans. Among other things, these controversies reveal the extent to which \"citizens\" per se have never been treated as necessarily equal in all respects. Puerto Rico therefore raises fundamental questions that deserve the attention of anyone interested in American constitutional development.

In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa studies the diverse ways that the Victorian novel imagines women as property removed from the uncertainties of the marketplace. Along the way, he notices how the categories of economics, gender, sexuality, race, and fiction define one another in the Victorian novel. If the novel figures women as safe property, Nunokawa argues, the novel figures safe property as a woman. And if the novel identifies the angel of the house, the desexualized subject of Victorian fantasies of ideal womanhood, as safe property, it identifies various types of fiction, illicit sexualities, and foreign races with the enemy of such property: the commodity form. Nunokawa shows how these convergences of fiction, sexuality, and race with the commodity form are part of a scapegoat scenario, in which the otherwise ubiquitous instabilities of the marketplace can be contained and expunged, clearing the way for secure possession. The Afterlife of Property addresses literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.

In Brennan and Democracy, a leading thinker in U.S. constitutional law offers some powerful reflections on the idea of \"constitutional democracy,\" a concept in which many have seen the makings of paradox. Here Frank Michelman explores the apparently conflicting commitments of a democratic governmental system where key aspects of such important social issues as affirmative action, campaign finance reform, and abortion rights are settled not by a legislative vote but by the decisions of unelected judges. Can we--or should we--embrace the values of democracy together with constitutionalism, judicial supervision, and the rule of law? To answer this question, Michelman calls into service the judicial career of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, the country's model \"activist\" judge for the past forty years. Michelman draws on Brennan's record and writings to suggest how the Justice himself might have understood the judiciary's role in the simultaneous promotion of both democratic and constitutional government.

Uncivil Disobedienceexamines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people. Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a \"bottom-up\" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law. Uncivil Disobediencecalls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.

THE YEAR 2007 WILL BE THE SESQUICENTENNIAL OF THE DRED SCOTT case, perhaps the most reviled case in American constitutional history because of its endorsement of slavery as constitutionally protected.1 Slavery might have been evil, but this did not prevent its full integration into the warp and woof of American constitutional law, not least because the presumed overarching good of creating and then maintaining a union took precedence over alleviating the plight of slaves. In this context, one might recall that Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, went out of his way to reassure the slave states not only that he meant no harm to their entrenched practices, but also that that he would support a proposed constitutional amendment that would in effect guarantee the maintenance of slavery in perpetuity, at least in the absence of a voluntary decision by the affected states to cease the practice.

School choice has lately risen to the top of the list of potential solutions to America's educational problems, particularly for the poor and the most disadvantaged members of society. Indeed, in the last few years several states have held referendums on the use of vouchers in private and parochial schools, and more recently, the Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of a scholarship program that uses vouchers issued to parents. While there has been much debate over the empirical and methodological aspects of school choice policies, discussions related to the effects such policies may have on the nation's moral economy and civil society have been few and far between.School Choice, a collection of essays by leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, and theologians, redresses this situation by addressing the moral and normative side of school choice. The twelve essays, commissioned for a conference on school choice that took place at Boston College in 2001, are organized into four sections that consider the relationship of school choice to equality, moral pluralism, institutional ecology, and constitutionality. Each section consists of three essays followed by a critical response. The contributors are Patrick McKinley Brennan, Charles L. Glenn, Amy Gutmann, David Hollenbach, S. J., Meira Levinson, Sanford Levinson, Stephen Macedo, John T. McGreevy, Martha Minow, Richard J. Mouw, Joseph O'Keefe, S. J., Michael J. Perry, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Rosemary C. Salomone, Joseph P. Viteritti, Paul J. Weithman, and Alan Wolfe.