Posted by KatNip on September 30, 1998 at 01:49:42:
In Reply to: Paul Mitchell's letter to Dan Meador, 9/29/98 posted by Paul Andrew Mitchell, B.A., M.S. on September 30, 1998 at 01:03:30:
Paul, thanks for sharing the letters!
"In conflict of laws 'state' means any
geographical portion of the earth’s surface
having an independent system of law.
All portions of a federal system are states,
though they are not fully sovereign and
ARE NOT States of the Union."
Robert Allen Sedler, The Erie Outcome
Test as a Guide to Substance and Procedure
in the Conflicts of Law, 37 New York University
Law Review, 813 n. 1 (1962). [upper-case emphasis mine]
Also, I don't know if you're familiar
article below.
“The ‘original republic’--the one for which our ‘forefathers’ fought ‘face to face-hand to hand, exists only in the minds of academics and fundamentalist patriots. The republic created in 1789 is long gone. It died with the 600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War.”
“The new Constitution--the one that shapes and guides the national government and disturbs the new patriots to their core--begins to take hold in the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln skips over the original Constitution.... This short speech functions as the Preamble to the new charter that crystallizes after the war in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”
“Nationhood, equality and democracy--these are the ideas that forge the new Constitution. But Lincoln was a good, and lawyers always seek to camouflage conceptual transformations as the continuous outgrowth of language used in the past. That’s why he invoked government ‘by the people’ to capture the new principle of democratic rule. But the significance of the People had changed. They no longer exist as the guarantors of the Constitution, the bestowers of legitimacy. States and individuals can no longer set themselves apart from the nation. The people exist exclusively as voters, as office holders and beneficiaries of legislation.” George P. Fletcher (Columbia Law Professor), The New Republic, June 23, 1997, pages 14-18.
dubau_dubau_dubau_dot_columbia.edu/cu/staff/
Name: GEORGE P FLETCHER
Title: CARDOZO PROF OF JURISPRUDENCE
Dept: SCHOOL OF LAW
EMail: gpf1@columbia.edu