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Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials, Ninth Edition

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Authors
  • Sanford Levinson
  • Jack M. Balkin
  • Akhil Reed Amar
  • Reva B. Siegel
  • Cristina M. Rodriguez
Series / Aspen Casebook Series
BOOKMARK
Book length
1840 pages
Publication Date
2026-03-04
Edition
Ninth Edition
Description
Table of contents
Preface

Buy a new version of this textbook and receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on Casebook Connect, including academic lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities. Access also includes practice questions, an outline tool, and other helpful resources. Connected eBooks provide what you need most to be successful in your law school classes.



Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking is the premier textbook in the field for a historical approach to Constitutional Law that helps students understand the origins of current constitutional controversies. In this book, an extraordinary team of authors traces the historical, political, and social development of constitutional law. Students will consider constitutional questions in a broad historical context, with cutting-edge insights from contemporary scholars. This book has been updated to include all new developments in the field, and delivers strong chapters on the constitutional treatment of race, sex, sexual orientation, civil rights, separation of powers, and federalism. 

New to the Ninth Edition:

  • Trump v. United States (presidential immunity)
  • Trump v. Anderson (presidential disqualification)
  • Trump v. Wilcox (presidential removal and independent federal agencies)
  • Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (abortion)
  • SFFA v. Harvard (affirmative action)
  • United States v. Skrmetti (transgender rights)
  • New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (Second Amendment)
  • United States v. Rahimi (Second Amendment)
  • New materials on executive power
  • New coverage of State Action Doctrine
  • New Note on the Rights Revolution of the 1960s 

Benefits for instructors and students:

  • Traces the historical, political, and social development of constitutional law, and considers constitutional questions in their political, social, and historical contexts
  • Focuses on the role of political and social movements in constitutional change
  • Presents cutting-edge contributions from important contemporary legal scholars
  • Discusses seminal cases from the annals of history that show the relevance of historical materials to modern constitutional analysis
  • Provides full treatment of important issues of civil rights, federalism, and separation of powers, placing each in its historical context
  • Draws on the combined expertise of an outstanding author team
  • Contains particularly strong chapters on the constitutional treatment of race, sex, and sexual orientation
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Table of contents

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

Contents 
Preface 
Acknowledgments 
Editorial Note 


The Constitution of the United States 
PART 1 INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND
TO THE CONSTITUTION 
Chapter 1. The Bank of the United States: A Case Study 
Chapter 2. The Constitution in the Early Republic 
Chapter 3. Are We a Nation? The Jacksonian Era to the Civil War,
1835-1865 
Chapter 4. From Reconstruction to the New Deal: 1866-1934 357
Appendix to Chapter 4 (online) 
PART 2 CONSTITUTIONAL ADJUDICATION
IN THE MODERN WORLD 
Chapter 5. The New Deal and the Civil Rights Era 
Appendix to Chapter 5 (online) 
Chapter 6. Federalism, Separation of Powers, and National Security in
the Modern Era 
Appendix to Chapter 6 (online) 
Chapter 7. Race and the Equal Protection Clause 
Appendix to Chapter 7 (online) 
Chapter 8. Sex Equality 
Chapter 9. Liberty, Equality, and Fundamental Rights: The
Constitution, the Family, and the Body 
Chapter 10. The Constitution in the Modern Welfare State 
Appendix to Chapter 10 (online) 


Table of Justices 
Table of Cases 
Index 
 

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Preface
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About the authors
Sanford V. Levinson
W. St. John Garwood &spamp;amp; W. St. John Garwood, Jr. &spamp;amp; Centennial Chair and Professor of Government
University of Texas at Austin School of Law

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. The author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals—and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization—Levinson is also the author of four books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); and, most recently, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) (2006); and, most recently, Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012). The Yale University Press will be publishing in 2015 a collection of 85 short essays on each of the 85 Federalist papers.

Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. 2014, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Bartholomew Sparrow); and Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006), which includes reflections on the morality, law, and politics of torture from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, as well as a forthcoming volume of essays to be published by the University of Kansas Press on 'neo-nullificationism and -secessionism' in contemporary political and constitutional thought.

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

Jack M. Balkin
Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment
Yale Law School

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is the founder and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. He also directs the Abrams Institute for Free Expression and the Knight Law and Media Program. Professor Balkin edits the group blog Balkinization. His fifteen books include Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation (2024), The Cycles of Constitutional Time (2020), Democracy and Dysfunction (with Sanford Levinson) (2019), Living Originalism (2011), Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World (2011), Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (8th ed., 2022, with Levinson, Amar, Siegel, and Rodríguez), Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (1998), and What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said (2001).

Professor Balkin received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University, and his A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University. He served as a clerk for Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Akhil Reed Amar
Sterling Professor of Law
Yale Law School

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. He received his B.A, summa cum laude, in 1980 from Yale College, and his J.D. in 1984 from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Judge Stephen Breyer, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1st Circuit, Professor Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985. Along with Dean Paul Brest and Professors Sanford Levinson, Jack Balkin, and Reva Siegel, Professor Amar is the co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking. He is also the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (Yale Univ. Press, 1997), The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), America's Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005), and most recently, America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2012).

Reva B. Siegel
Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law
Yale Law School

Professor Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Siegel writes widely in constitutional law and legal history, examining how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. Recent publications include: The Ambitions of “History and Tradition” in and beyond the Second Amendment, 174 U. Penn. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026) (with Joseph Blocher); Democratizing Constitutional Memory, 123 Mich. L. Rev. 1011 (2025); Comstockery: How Government Censorship Gave Birth to the Law of Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, and May Again Threaten It, 134 Yale L.J. 1068 (2025) (with Mary Ziegler); The Levels-of-Generality Game: “History and Tradition” in the Roberts Court, 47 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 565 (2024); The History of History and Tradition: The Roots of Dobbs’s Method (and Originalism) in the Defense of Segregation, 133 Yale L.J.F. 99 (2023); The Politics of Constitutional Memory, 20 Geo. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 19 (2022). Her books include Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (edited with Sanford Levinson, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, & Cristina Rodríguez, 8th ed. 2022); Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories (edited with Melissa Murray & Kate Shaw 2019); and Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (with Linda Greenhouse 2012).

Professor Siegel received her B.A., M.Phil, and J.D. from Yale University, and clerked for Judge Spottswood Robinson on the D.C. Circuit. She. is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History. She serves on the board of Advisors and the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society and on the General Council of the International Society of Public Law.

Cristina M. Rodríguez
Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law
YALE LAW SCHOOL

Cristina M. Rodríguez is the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her fields of research and teaching include constitutional law and theory, immigration law and policy, administrative law and process, and citizenship theory. In 2021, she was appointed by President Biden to co-chair the Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. Her recent writings include the 2020 Foreword to the Harvard Law Review, “Regime Change,” and the book, The President and Immigration Law, co-authored with Adam Cox and published by Oxford University Press in September 2020. In recent years, her work has focused on the relationships between administrative and executive governance and democratic politics and decisionmaking. She has turned to immigration law and related areas as vehicles through which to explore how the allocation and exercise of power (through federalism, the separation of powers, and the structure of the bureaucracy) shapes the management and resolution of legal and political conflict. Her work also has examined the effects of immigration on society and culture, as well as the legal and political strategies societies adopt to absorb immigrant populations. Rodríguez joined Yale Law School in 2013 after serving for two years as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. She was on the faculty at the New York University School of Law from 2004–2012 and has been Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia Law Schools. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, a trustee and non-resident fellow of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and a past member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Letters in Modern History. Following law school, Rodríguez clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Product Information
Edition
Ninth Edition
Publication date
2026-03-04
Copyright Year
2026
Pages
1840
LLPOD
9798894104812
eBook
9798894104799
Print + eBook
9798894104782
Subject
Constitutional Law
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