The Strange, Strange Case of Strange Uncles, Lions, Giraffes, and a Panda Bear

1 November 2011. "The Odd Clauses" by Jay Wexler is out.

Jay Wexler is a professor of law at the Boston University. His link to Poland is that in 2008, he taught here a brilliant and inspiring course on relations between law and religion in American constitutional law. But back in 2008, he was already working on his new book, The Odd Clauses which just came out. From the first two paragraphs:

The Constitution of the United States contains some of the most powerful and well-known legal provisions in the history of the world.  The First Amendment, for example, gives us the right to speak our minds without government interference.  The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment stops the state from discriminating against us because of our race or gender.  And the Fourth Amendment, as our television crime dramas constantly remind us, prevents the police from searching our homes without a warrant. In the past twenty years, I would bet that several hundred books have been written about these important clauses, and for good reason.  This book, however, is not one of them.

Instead, this book will shine a much-deserved light on some of the Constitution’s lesser-known clauses—its benchwarmers, its understudies, its unsung heroes, its crazy uncles.  To put it another way, if the Constitution were a zoo, and the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments were a lion, a giraffe, and a panda bear, respectively, then this book is about the Constitution’s shrews, wombats, and bat-eared foxes.  And believe me, if you’ve never laid eyes on a bat-eared fox before, you are in for a treat. 

Read more at the Odd Clauses Watch.