Word: laying
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Still ahead lay nine months of bitter debate before the necessary nine states ratified what had been written that summer in Philadelphia. Ahead lay the creation of the Bill of Rights. Ahead lay the Civil War, which led to the 13th Amendment, finally abolishing slavery. And the 19th Amendment declaring that women have the right to vote. But on this 17th day of September 1787, Washington wrote in his journal: "The business being closed, the members adjourned to the City Tavern, dined together and took a cordial leave of each other; after which I returned to my lodgings . . . and retired...
...Soviets are living under their fourth constitution. The first, adopted in July 1918, attempted to lay out the structure of the Soviet government without even mentioning the Communist Party. The 1924 constitution, which formally recognized the creation of the multinational Soviet Union, gave individual states the right to secede -- a fiction that remains in the current text. The 1936 revision, known as the Stalin constitution, theoretically expanded personal freedoms at a time when the dictator's Great Terror was sweeping the country. The current version was adopted in 1977. One of its key changes: the right to sue the state...
...experiment as the U.S. is an experiment. It was flawed from the beginning as the nation was flawed. But the Constitution has also been the genius of America, the life of its laws and the conscience of its power. The Constitution and the country formed each other. The genius lay in the hermeneutical life of the document, the complicated, brilliant, sometimes disgraceful unfolding of America...
...often find it instructive to consult the framers when I am called upon to interpret the Constitution. But it is the beginning of my inquiry, not the end . . . The framers' legacy to modern times is the language and spirit of the Constitution, not the conflict and dated conceptions that lay beneath that language...
...Taken in bulk, The Federalist can be heavy going for the lay reader, with its sometimes intricate marshaling of closely reasoned arguments. Madison rated it "admissible as a School book if any will be that goes so much into detail." But the brilliance of the best individual essays remains undiminished. Madison's own masterly "Federalist No. 10," for example, took issue with the received wisdom of his day that the Government would be threatened by the mutually hostile factions with which a sprawling America appeared dangerously overloaded. By their very number and variety, Madison argued, the factions would support...