Overview

Full Product Details

9780197685457

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""The war on drugs has been a moral, political, and policy catastrophe. This stunningly original, powerful book shows that it has been a constitutional catastrophe as well. Fundamental guarantees of liberty, privacy, free expression, fair punishment, and racial equality--all have been sacrificed by the Supreme Court in service of the war effort. Mapping an alternative constitutional path toward sane drug policy and social justice, Pozen masterfully teaches a painful lesson about the failures, if not limits, of constitutional law."" -- Daryl Levinson, New York University ""The Constitution of the War on Drugs is a profound achievement. Pozen uncovers a lost and expansive history of legal challenges to draconian drug policies. The result is a bracing and truly innovative work of legal reconstruction and moral argument, one that compels lawyers and scholars to fundamentally rethink the role of constitutional law in fortifying a failed carceral state. It is essential reading for anyone, academic or activist, committed to understanding how we got here and how to imagine a different horizon."" -- Aziz Rana, author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them ""Constitutional litigation and drug liberalization have often gone hand in hand around the world. But not in the United States. Why not? What happened to the U.S. drug reform movement? And what does this tell us about modern American constitutional jurisprudence and social movement advocacy? In this brilliant and original new book, David Pozen answers these questions and more--leaving us with a profound sense of the limits of American constitutionalism as an answer to the challenges of our time."" -- Rosalind Dixon, University of New South Wales ""David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a masterful assessment of the clash between repressive drug policies and the values embedded in American constitutionalism. One inescapable lesson of the past half century is that criminalization of drug use and addiction have been costly (indeed deadly) and counterproductive. Pozen's detailed review sets the stage for long-overdue policy experiments relying less on criminalization while coming to terms with unavoidable tradeoffs between individual liberty and public health."" -- Richard Bonnie, author of The Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States ""Pozen has produced a surprising, eye-opening account of how constitutional law might have been a bulwark against the worst excesses of the war on drugs if not for the highly contingent choices of lawyers and judges during the late twentieth century. Chock full of strategic insights and fascinating stories, The Constitution of the War on Drugs is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the drug war was created and sustained, as well as how it fits within the shifting landscape of American constitutional practice."" -- Monica Bell, Yale University ""It can't have been easy to write a book whose central motif is that legal efforts to constitutionalize and decriminalize various drugs have usually led down 'paths to nowhere.' And yet the result is a triumph of the legal imagination. David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a transcendent constitutional history of the last half-century of criminal drug bans. Brilliantly conceptualized and realized, filled with imaginatively researched stories, The Constitution of the War on Drugs is much more than a history of a particular arena of continuing constitutional failure, although the book is certainly that."" -- Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University"

"""Pozen has produced a surprising, eye-opening account of how constitutional law might have been a bulwark against the worst excesses of the war on drugs if not for the highly contingent choices of lawyers and judges during the late twentieth century. Chock full of strategic insights and fascinating stories, The Constitution of the War on Drugs is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the drug war was created and sustained, as well as how it fits within the shifting landscape of American constitutional practice."" -- Monica Bell, Yale University""David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a masterful assessment of the clash between repressive drug policies and the values embedded in American constitutionalism. One inescapable lesson of the past half century is that criminalization of drug use and addiction have been costly (indeed deadly) and counterproductive. Pozen's detailed review sets the stage for long-overdue policy experiments relying less on criminalization while coming to terms with unavoidable tradeoffs between individual liberty and public health."" -- Richard Bonnie, author of The Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States""Constitutional litigation and drug liberalization have often gone hand in hand around the world. But not in the United States. Why not? What happened to the U.S. drug reform movement? And what does this tell us about modern American constitutional jurisprudence and social movement advocacy? In this brilliant and original new book, David Pozen answers these questions and more--leaving us with a profound sense of the limits of American constitutionalism as an answer to the challenges of our time."" -- Rosalind Dixon, University of New South Wales""It can't have been easy to write a book whose central motif is that legal efforts to constitutionalize and decriminalize various drugs have usually led down 'paths to nowhere.' And yet the result is a triumph of the legal imagination. David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a transcendent constitutional history of the last half-century of criminal drug bans. Brilliantly conceptualized and realized, filled with imaginatively researched stories, The Constitution of the War on Drugs is much more than a history of a particular arena of continuing constitutional failure, although the book is certainly that."" -- Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University""The war on drugs has been a moral, political, and policy catastrophe. This stunningly original, powerful book shows that it has been a constitutional catastrophe as well. Fundamental guarantees of liberty, privacy, free expression, fair punishment, and racial equality-all have been sacrificed by the Supreme Court in service of the war effort. Mapping an alternative constitutional path toward sane drug policy and social justice, Pozen masterfully teaches a painful lesson about the failures, if not limits, of constitutional law."" -- Daryl Levinson, New York University""The Constitution of the War on Drugs is a profound achievement. Pozen uncovers a lost and expansive history of legal challenges to draconian drug policies. The result is a bracing and truly innovative work of legal reconstruction and moral argument, one that compels lawyers and scholars to fundamentally rethink the role of constitutional law in fortifying a failed carceral state. It is essential reading for anyone, academic or activist, committed to understanding how we got here and how to imagine a different horizon."" -- Aziz Rana, author of The Constitutional Bind"

Author Information

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He teaches and writes about constitutional law, information law, and nonprofit law, among other topics. Pozen previously served as special assistant to Senator Ted Kennedy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, special advisor to Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh at the U.S. Department of State, and law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Merrick Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In 2019, the American Law Institute named Pozen the recipient of its Early Career Scholars Medal.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available