Cornell, who is the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at the school, said the Constitution incorporates lessons learned while the nation was under the Articles of Confederation.

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When Hayek, the famous Austrian school economist, published The Constitution of Liberty in 1960, he was not focused on reforming communications law and policy.

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So you would think it would appreciate significant gift offers, such as the recent offer by a former state Supreme Court justice and the John William Pope Foundation to establish a Center for the North Carolina Constitution at the NCCU Law School.

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It is not a strong interest in the constitution that has fired the public-school teachers.

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Mr. Barnett is professor of legal theory at Georgetown Law School and the author of "Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty" (Princeton University, 2005).

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Thirty-one-year-old Fereshta Ludin, who was denied a job in Baden-Wuerttemberg in 1998 because she wore a headscarf in school, went to courts arguing that the German constitution guaranteed her religious freedom.

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Thus, a student-led prayer offends against the constitution just as surely as one delivered by a school official.

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For example, Congress arguably did stretch the constitution's commerce clause beyond reasonable bounds when it passed the school-gun law, which has little to do with interstate trade.

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So this year the Coalition resolved to have the constitution amended to restore the act's protections, and also to allow school prayer.

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His texts are: Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, Friedrich A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty and, though he's not technically a member of the Austrian School, Joseph Schumpeter's Business Cycles.

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"This is simply going to be a case about the Maryland state constitution, " said Mark A. Graber, a law professor at the University of Maryland School of Law.

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