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This monograph explores how the constitutional courts in the United States, Germany, and South Africa have invoked slavery, Nazism, and apartheid - three historical evils - as an aid in constitutional interpretation. It examines how the memory of evil pasts moulds constitutional meaning in the contested present.
List of contents
- I. Introduction: Constitutional Justice and Collective Memory
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Modes of Judicial Memory
- 3: The Modes and the Courts
- 4: Constitutional Memory in Comparative Perspective
- 5: Conclusion
- PART ONE: SLAVERY
- II. A Century of Lost Time: 1865-1954
- 1: Introduction: Memorial Day 1895
- 2: Mnemonic Gilded Age - After Appomattox: 1865-1896
- 3: After Plessy: 1896-1954
- III. After Brown
- 1: Introduction
- 2: From Brown to the Civil Rights Act: 1954-1964
- 3: From the Civil Rights Act to Bakke: 1964-1978
- 4: From Bakke to Grutter: 1978-2003
- 5: Constitutional Memory on the Roberts Court
- 6: Conclusion
- PART TWO: AFTER AUSCHWITZ
- IV. After Hitler: 1951-1975
- 1: Introduction: 10 March 1965
- 2: Anti-Nazi Assertion and Parenthetical Restraint: 1949-1959
- 3: Memory Subdued, then Roused: 1959-1975
- 4: The Social-Liberal Coalition: 1969-1975
- 5: Conclusion
- V. Forever in Hitler's Shadow? The Court Since 1975
- 1: Introduction: Constitutional Patriotism and the Pre-Constitutional Past
- 2: The Path to Permanence: 1975-1990
- 3: Republic of Memory: 1989 and Beyond
- 4: Conclusion: Generations of Judicial Memory
- PART THREE: AFTER APARTHEID
- VI. South Africa's First Constitutional Court: 1995-2005
- 1: Introduction: 10 May 1994
- 2: Epic Beginnings
- 3: Crime, Punishment, and the Mnemonics of Redemption
- 4: Bridge in the Background: The Presence of the Past
- 5: Spheres of Equality
- 6: Realms of Liberty
- 7: Realms of Positive Freedom: Socio-Economic Rights
- 8: Conclusion
- VII. Chasing Rainbows: 2005-2020
- 1: Introduction: Rainbows End?
- 2: Continuities
- 3: Making National Memory
- 4: Memory and Power
- 5: Political Rights
- 6: Socio-Economic Rights
- 7: Conclusion: The Limits of Judicial Vergangenheitsbewältigung
- VIII. Conclusion: Memory in the Balance
- 1: Constitutional Courts as Sites of Memory
- 2: Revisiting Modes and Models
About the author
Justin Collings is Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School of Brigham Young University, where he has taught since 2013. He is the author of Democracy's Guardians: A History of the German Federal Constitutional Court, 1951-2001 (OUP, 2015). He holds both a PhD in History and a JD from Yale University and was a law clerk to the Honourable Guido Calabresi at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Summary
This monograph explores how the constitutional courts in the United States, Germany, and South Africa have invoked slavery, Nazism, and apartheid - three historical evils - as an aid in constitutional interpretation. It examines how the memory of evil pasts moulds constitutional meaning in the contested present.
