An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world. Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text’s design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life. In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home. Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights.

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The Disastrous Relationship Between Israel, Palestinians and the U.N.

The international legal system was created to prevent the atrocities of World War II from happening again. The United Nations partitioned historic Palestine to create the states of Israel and Palestine, but also left Palestinians with decades of false promises. The war in Gaza — and countless other conflicts, including those in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia — shows how little power the U.N. and international law have to protect civilians in wartime. So what is international law actually for? Aslı Ü. Bâli is a professor at Yale Law School who specializes in international and comparative law. “The fact that people break the law and sometimes get away with it doesn’t mean the law doesn’t exist and doesn’t have force,” she argues. In this conversation, Bâli traces the gap between how international law is written on paper and the realpolitik of how countries decide to follow it, the U.N.’s unique role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from its very beginning, how the laws of war have failed Gazans but may be starting to change the conflict’s course, and more.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, Series Number 37) by Antony Anghie
• 📘  Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine by Noura Erakat
• 📗  Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew
• 📙  The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them by Aziz Rana
• 📕  The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity by Ardi Imseis

Aslı Ü. Bâli May 17, 2024 5 books recommended

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