Picador USA
The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America
Key Metrics
- Noah Feldman
- Picador USA
- Paperback
- 9781250858788
- -
- -
- History > United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer
In The Broken Constitution, Noah Feldman tells the full story of how Lincoln tore up the Constitution in order to save it. Prior to the Civil War, the document was best understood as a compromise pact--a rough-and-ready deal that allowed the Union to be forged from a disparate collection of states. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text--a transcendent statement of the nation's highest ideals. This happened because of the choices Lincoln made in dramatic circumstances; as violence raged, he variously ignored, reviled, and revised long-standing beliefs and set the country on a new path. Approaching the Civil War from a fresh angle, Feldman offers a riveting narrative of Lincoln's constitutional choices and how he made them--from the resupply of Fort Sumter to the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation, and from the arrest of newspaper editors and politicians who opposed the draft to the rethinking of the country's core rights and to whom they belonged. To do so, he situates the sixteenth president within the rich context of the political and legal thinkers of his time, from African American abolitionists and traditionalist judges to Republican rivals and secessionist ideologues. The Broken Constitution calls not only for a reassessment of Lincoln himself but also for a new look at America's founding document and its place in our law, our politics, and ourselves.
Author Bio
Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, free speech, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory.
Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, he is also the Chairman of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution.
He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1994. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998).
He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He’s the author of nine books: Arab Winter: A Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2020), The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003).
He’s also the author of two textbooks with Kathleen Sullivan: Constitutional Law, Twentieth Edition (Foundation Press, Fall 2019) and First Amendment, Seventh Edition (Foundation Press, 2019).
Source: Harvard Law School
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