Bøger i Inalienable Rights serien

A powerful analysis of why lies and falsehoods spread so rapidly now, and how we can reform our laws and policies regarding speech to alleviate the problem.Lying has been with us from time immemorial. Yet today is different-and in many respects worse. All over the world, people are circulating damaging lies, and these falsehoods are amplified as never before through powerful social media platforms that reach billions. Liars are saying that COVID-19 is a hoax. They are claiming that vaccines cause autism. They are lying about public officials and about people who aspire to high office. They are lying about their friends and neighbors. They aretrying to sell products on the basis of untruths. Unfriendly governments, including Russia, are circulating lies in order to destabilize other nations, including the United Kingdom and the United States. In the face of those problems, the renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein probes the fundamentalquestion of how we can deter lies while also protecting freedom of speech.To be sure, we cannot eliminate lying, nor should we try to do so. Sunstein shows why free societies must generally allow falsehoods and lies, which cannot and should not be excised from democratic debate. A main reason is that we cannot trust governments to make unbiased judgments about what counts as "fake news." However, governments should have the power to regulate specific kinds of falsehoods: those that genuinely endanger health, safety, and the capacity of the public to govern itself.Sunstein also suggests that private institutions, such as Facebook and Twitter, have a great deal of room to stop the spread of falsehoods, and they should be exercising their authority far more than they are now doing. As Sunstein contends, we are allowing far too many lies, including those that boththreaten public health and undermine the foundations of democracy itself.

In Agreeing to Disagree, Michael W. McConnell and Nathan S. Chapman detail the theological, political, and philosophical underpinnings of religious disestablishment in the United States--and how they relate to modern controversies over school funding, accommodation, public prayer, and public religious symbols. They argue that the clause is not a thumb on the scale for secularism in public matters (let alone the opposite) but a constitutional commitment for Americans of all religious commitments--and none--to agree to disagree about matters of faith.

In Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Rakove makes broad claims about how religious freedom affects us. He contrasts the radical course of American developments with the more complicated ways in which Europeans tried to promote religious tolerance. He argues that both freedom of conscience and disestablishment were critical constitutional principles whose significance we no longer fully appreciate. Rakove explains why Jefferson's and Madison's understanding of these concepts were influential to their constitutional thinking. And he examines some of our contemporary controversies over church and state from the vantage point, not of legal doctrine, but of the deeper history that gave the U.S. its unique approach to religious freedom.

Nussbaum argues that disgust has long been among the fundamental motivations of those who are fighting for legal discrimination against lesbian and gay citizens. In its place she offers a "politics of humanity," based not merely on respect, but something akin to love, an active effort to see the world from their perspectives, as fellow human beings. Combining rigorous analysis of the leading constitutional cases with philosophical reflection about underlying concepts of privacy, respect, discrimination, and liberty, Nussbaum discusses issues ranging from non-discrimination and same-sex marriage to "public sex."

Renowned legal scholar Tribe argues that there is an unseen constitution--impalpable but powerful--that accompanies the parchment version, in the latest volume in Oxford's Inalienable Rights series.

Michael J. Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, is one of the leading authorities on the history of civil rights law in the United States. In Unfinished Business, he illuminates the course of racial equality in America, revealing that we have made less progress than we like to think. Indeed, African Americans have had to fight for everything they have achieved. The newest volume in Oxford's Inalienable Rights series, Unfinished Business offers an invaluable, succinct account of racial equality and civil rights throughout American history.

An exploration of how and why the Constitution''s plan for independent courts has failed to protect individuals'' constitutional rights, while advancing regressive and reactionary barriers to progressive regulation. Just recently, the Supreme Court rejected an argument by plaintiffs that police officers should no longer be protected by the doctrine of "qualified immunity" when they shoot or brutalize an innocent civilian. "Qualified immunity" is but one of several judicial inventions that shields state violence and thwarts the vindication of our rights. But aren''t courts supposed to be protectors of individual rights? As Aziz Huq shows in The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, history revealsa much more tangled relationship between the Constitution''s system of independent courts and the protection of constitutional rights. While doctrines such as "qualified immunity" may seem abstract, their real-world harms are anything but. A highway patrol officer stops a person''s car in violation of the Fourth Amendment, violently yanked the person out and threw him to the ground, causing brain damage. A municipal agency fires a person for testifying in a legal proceeding involving her boss''s family-and then laughed in her face when she demanded her job back. In all these cases, state defendants walked away with the mostminor of penalties (if any at all). Ultimately, we may have rights when challenging the state, but no remedies. In fact, federal courts have long been fickle and unreliable guardians of individual rights. To be sure, through the mid-twentieth century, the courts positioned themselves as the ultimateprotector of citizens suffering the state''s infringement of their rights. But they have more recently abandoned, and even aggressively repudiated, a role as the protector of individual rights in the face of abuses by the state. Ironically, this collapse highlights the position that the Framers took when setting up federal courts in the first place.A powerful historical account of the how the expansion of the immunity principle generated yawning gap between rights and remedies in contemporary America, The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies will reshape our understanding of why it has become so difficult to effectively challenge crimes committed by the state.

In The Living Constitution (part of the Inalienable Rights book series) acclaimed constitutional scholar David Strauss argues that these two approaches are reconcilable.

A detailed argument of how our government has interfered in the direction of America''s media landscape that traces major transformations in media since the printing press and charts a path for reform. In The Changing Ecosystem of the News, Martha Minow takes stock of the new media landscape. She focuses on the extent to which our constitutional system is to blame for the current parlous state of affairs and on our government''s responsibilities for alleviating the problem. As Minow shows, the First Amendment of the US Constitution assumes the existence and durability of a private industry. Although the First Amendment does not govern the conduct of entirely private enterprises,nothing in the Constitution forecloses government action to regulate concentrated economic power, to require disclosure of who is financing communications, or to support news initiatives where there are market failures. Moreover, the federal government has contributed financial resources, laws, and regulations todevelop and shape media in the United States. Thus, Minow argues that the transformation of media from printing presses to the internet was shaped by deliberate government policies that influenced the direction of private enterprise. In short, the government has crafted the direction and contours of America''s media ecosystem.Building upon this basic argument, Minow outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.

In HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship, Strossen dispels the many misunderstandings that have clouded the perpetual debates about "hate speech vs. free speech," and shows that the U.S. First Amendment approach effectively promotes all pertinent concerns: free speech, democracy, equality and societal harmony

In Democracy and Equality, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Warren Court, the eminent legal scholars Geoffrey R. Stone and David A. Strauss demonstrate that the jurisprudence of the Warren Court represented a high point in the history of constitutional interpretation, and that the Warren Court's approach to the Constitution was principled and consistent with the core values of our Constitution and the fundamental responsibilities ofour judiciary. Despite almost sixty-five years of unwarranted attacks by conservatives, the contributions of the Warren Court to our nation's commitments to democracy and equality remain unmatched in the history of the Supreme Court.

Renowned national security law scholar Laura Donohue traces the evolution of privacy law in the digital age, and pairs that account with a history of the growth of the national security state's intelligence apparatus over the last two decades.

In this book, Stephen Shulhofer explores the changes wrought by the new surveillance regime through the lens of the Fourth Amendment's meaning and history. companies and the state use to scrutinize us, this book makes a powerful case for the importance of the Fourth Amendment in protecting both privacy rights and civil liberties in our surveillance age.

In On Constitutional Disobedience, leading constitutional scholar Louis Michael Seidman explains why constitutional disobedience may well produce a better politics and considers the shape that such disobedience might take. First, though, he stresses that is worth remembering the primary goals of the original Constitution's authors, many of which were unseemly both then and now. Should we really feel obligated to defend our electoral college or various other features that arguably leadto unjust results? Yet many of our political debates revolve around constitutional features that no one loves but which everyone feels obligated to defend. After walking through the various defenses put forth by proponents of the US Constitutional system, Seidman shows why none of them hold up. Thesolution, he claims, is to abandon our loyalty to many of the document's requirements and instead embrace the Constitution as a 'poetic' vision of a just society. Lest we worry that forsaking the Constitution will result in anarchy, we only need to remember Great Britain, which functions very effectively without a written constitution. If we were to do this, we could design sensible institutions that fit our own era and craft solutions that have the support of today's majorities. Seidmanworries that if we continue to embrace the anachronistic commands of a centuries-old document, our political and institutional dysfunction will only increase. The answer is not to abandon the Constitution in its entirety, but to treat it as an inspiration while disobeying the many particulars thatdeserve to go into history's dustbin.

What underlies this development? In this concise and highly engaging work, Federal Appeals Court Judge and noted author (From Brown to Bakke) J. Harvie Wilkinson argues that America's most brilliant legal minds have launched a set of cosmic constitutional theories that, for all their value, are undermining self-governance.

Throughout American history, views on the proper relationship between the state and religion have been deeply divided. And, with recent changes in the composition of the Supreme Court, First Amendment law concerning religion is likely to change dramatically in the years ahead. In The Religion Clauses, Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, two of America''s leading constitutional scholars, begin by explaining how freedom of religion is enshrined in the First Amendment through two provisions. They defend a robust view of both clauses and work from the premise that that the establishment clause is best understood, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, as creating a wall separating church and state. After examining all the major approaches to the meaning of theConstitution''s religion clauses, they contend that the best approaches are for the government to be strictly secular and for there to be no special exemptions for religious people from neutral and general laws that others must obey. In an America that is only becoming more diverse with respect to religion, this isnot only the fairest approach, but the one most in tune with what the First Amendment actually prescribes. Both a pithy primer on the meaning of the religion clauses and a broad-ranging indictment of the Court''s misinterpretation of them in recent years, The Religion Clauses shows how a separationist approach is most consistent with the concerns of the founders who drafted the Constitution and with the needs of a religiously pluralistic society in the 21st century.

Nearly all countries have ratified nearly all the major human rights treaties, and all governments profess support for human rights, yet most countries flagrantly violate the human rights of their citizens.

Lee Bollinger is one of our foremost experts on the First Amendment-both an erudite scholar and elegant advocate. In this sweeping account, he explores the troubled history of a free press in America and looks toward the challenges ahead. The first amendment guaranteed freedom of the press in seemingly clear terms. However, over the course of American history, Bollinger notes, the idea of press freedom has evolved, in response to social, political, technological, and legal changes. It was not until the twentieth century that freedom of the press came to be understood as guaranteeing an "uninhibited, robust and wide-open" public discourse. But even during the twentieth century, government continually tried to erect barriers:the sedition laws of World War One, the use of libel law, the Pentagon Papers case, and efforts to limit press access to information. Bollinger utilizes this history to explore the meaning of freedom of the press in our globalized, internet-dominated era. As he shows, we have now entered uncharted territory. What does press freedom mean when our news outlets can instantaneously disseminate information throughout the world? When foreign media have immediate access to the American market? Bollinger stresses that even though the law will surely evolve in the coming years, we must maintain our commitment to a press that is"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open," not only in America but everywhere. Given the new ability of foreign media to reach the United States via the Internet and vice versa, it is in America's national interest for press freedoms to expand overseas. While protecting the freedom of the press at homeremains a crucial task, the next challenge is to help create a global public forum suitable for an increasingly interconnected world. Part of Oxford's landmark Inalienable Rights series, this book will set the agenda for how we think about the press in the twenty-first century.

In this groundbreaking book, eminent legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues that in every era, constitutional debates are, in fact, contests between four different types of 'Constitutional Personae' - Heroes, Soldiers, Minimalists, and Mutes.