In the twentieth century, American society has experienced a "rights revolution" a commitment by the national government to promote a healthful environment, safe products, freedom from discrimination, and other rights unknown to the founding generation. This development has profoundly affected constitutional democracy by skewing the original understanding of checks and balances, federalism, and individual rights. Cass Sunstein tells us how it is possible to interpret and reform this regulatory state regime in a way that will enhance freedom and welfare while remaining faithful to constitutional commitments. Sunstein vigorously defends government regulation against Reaganite/Thatcherite attacks based on free-market economics and pre-New Deal principles of private right. Focusing on the important interests in clean air and water, a safe workplace, access to the air waves, and protection against discrimination, he shows that regulatory initiatives have proved far superior to an approach that relies solely on private enterprise. Sunstein grants that some regulatory regimes have failed and calls for reforms that would amount to an American perestroika: a restructuring that embraces the use of government to further democratic goals but that insists on the decentralization and productive potential of private markets. Sunstein also proposes a theory of interpretation that courts and administrative agencies could use to secure constitutional goals and to improve the operation of regulatory programs. From this theory he seeks to develop a set of principles that would synthesize the modern regulatory state with the basic premises of the American constitutional system. Teachers of law, policymakers and political scientists, economists and historians, and a general audience interested in rights, regulation, and government will find this book an essential addition to their libraries.

List of Tables and FiguresAcknowledgments1: Introduction 2: The Conditions for the Rights Revolution: Theory 3: The United States: Standard Explanations for the Rights Revolution 4: The Support Structure and the U.S. Rights Revolution 5: India: An Ideal Environment for a Rights Revolution? 6: India's Weak Rights Revolution and Its Handicap 7: Britain: An Inhospitable Environment for a Rights Revolution? 8: Britain's Modest Rights Revolution and Its Sources 9: Canada: A Great Experiment in Constitutional Engineering 10: Canada's Dramatic Rights Revolution and Its Sources 11: Conclusion: Constitutionalism, Judicial Power, and Rights App: Selected Constitutional or Quasi-Constitutional Rights Provisions for the United States, India, Britain, and Canada Notes Bibliography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

In the wake of the black civil rights movement, other disadvantaged groups of Americans began to make headway. In the first book to take a broad perspective on this wide-ranging and far-reaching phenomenon, Skrentny exposes the connections between the diverse actions and circumstances that contributed to this revolution.

Southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience but were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. Gavin Wright shows that the civil rights struggle was of economic benefit to all parties: the wages of southern blacks increased dramatically but not at the expense of southern whites.

The rights revolution in the United States consisted of both sweeping changes in constitutional doctrines and landmark legislative reform, followed by decades of innovative implementation in every branch of the federal government - Congress, agencies, and the courts. In recent years, a growing number of political scientists have sought to integrate studies of the rights revolution into accounts of the contemporary American state. In The Rights Revolution Revisited, a distinguished group of political scientists and legal scholars explore the institutional dynamics, scope, and durability of the rights revolution. By offering an inter-branch analysis of the development of civil rights laws and policies that features the role of private enforcement, this volume enriches our understanding of the rise of the 'civil rights state' and its fate in the current era.

It is well known that the scope of individual rights has expanded dramatically in the United States over the last half-century. Less well known is that other countries have experienced "rights revolutions" as well. Charles R. Epp argues that, far from being the fruit of an activist judiciary, the ascendancy of civil rights and liberties has rested on the democratization of access to the courts—the influence of advocacy groups, the establishment of governmental enforcement agencies, the growth of financial and legal resources for ordinary citizens, and the strategic planning of grass roots organizations. In other words, the shift in the rights of individuals is best understood as a "bottom up," rather than a "top down," phenomenon. The Rights Revolution is the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the growth of civil rights, examining the high courts of the United States, Britain, Canada, and India within their specific constitutional and cultural contexts. It brilliantly revises our understanding of the relationship between courts and social change.

The European Court of Human Rights has long held unparalleled sway over questions of human rights violations across continental Europe, Britain, and beyond. Both its supporters and detractors accept the common view that the European human rights system was originally devised as a means of containing communism and fascism after World War II. In The Conservative Human Rights Revolution, Marco Duranti radically reinterprets the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that conservatives conceived of the treaty not only as a Cold War measure, but also as a vehicle for pursuing a controversial domestic political agenda on either side of the Channel. Just as the Supreme Court of the United States had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a European Court of Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically elected governments to implement left-wing policies that British and French conservatives believed violated their basic liberties. Conservative human rights rhetoric, Duranti argues, evoked a romantic Christian vision of Europe. Rather than follow the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conservatives such as Winston Churchill grounded their appeals for new human rights safeguards in the values of a bygone European civilization. All told, these efforts served as a basis for reconciliation between Germans and the "West," the exclusion of communists from the European project, and the denial of equal protection to colonized peoples. Illuminating the history of internationalism and international law, and elucidating Churchill's Europeanism and critical contribution to the genesis of the ECHR, this book revisits the ethical foundations of European integration across the first half of the twentieth century and offers a new perspective on the crisis in which the European Union finds itself today.

Walker offers a vigorous defense of the rise of personal rights in America, conceding that the expansion of individual rights does present problems, but insisting that the gains far outweigh the losses.

Between the Second World War and the early 1970s, political leaders, activists, citizens, protestors. and freedom fighters triggered a human rights revolution in world affairs. Stimulated particularly by the horrors of the crimes against humanity in the 1940s, the human rights revolution grew rapidly to subsume claims from minorities, women, the politically oppressed, and marginal communities across the globe. The human rights revolution began with a disarmingly simple idea: that every individual, whatever his or her nationality, political beliefs, or ethnic and religious heritage, possesses an inviolable right to be treated with dignity. From this basic claim grew many more, and ever since, the cascading effect of these initial rights claims has dramatically shaped world history down to our own times. The contributors to this volume look at the wave of human rights legislation emerging out of World War II, including the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremberg trial, and the Geneva Conventions, and the expansion of human rights activity in the 1970s and beyond, including the anti-torture campaigns of Amnesty International, human rights politics in Indonesia and East Timor, the emergence of a human rights agenda among international scientists, and the global campaign female genital mutilation. The book concludes with a look at the UN Declaration at its 60th anniversary. Bringing together renowned senior scholars with a new generation of international historians, these essays set an ambitious agenda for the history of human rights.

"Symposium: The Meaning of the Civil Rights Revolution" is, in effect, a new and extensive book of contemporary thought on civil rights by many of today's leading writers on the Constitution. In February 2014, the Yale Law Journal held a symposium at Yale Law School marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the simultaneous publication of Bruce Ackerman’s We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution (2014). Contributors' essays reflected on the origins or status of the American civil rights project, using Ackerman’s book as a focal point or a foil. Those essays are collected as the June 2014 issue, the final issue of the academic year. The contents are: • We the People: Each and Every One — Randy E. Barnett • Reactionary Rhetoric and Liberal Legal Academia — Justin Driver • Popular Sovereignty and the United States Constitution: Tensions in the Ackermanian Program — Sanford Levinson • The Neo-Hamiltonian Temptation — David A. Strauss • The Civil Rights Canon: Above and Below — Tomiko Brown-Nagin • Changing the Wind: Notes Toward a Demosprudence of Law and Social Movements — Lani Guinier & Gerald Torres • Protecting Civil Rights in the Shadows — David A. Super • Universalism and Civil Rights (with Notes on Voting Rights After Shelby) — Samuel R. Bagenstos • Separate Spheres — Cary Franklin • Ackerman's Civil Rights Revolution and Modern American Racial Politics — Rogers M. Smith • Rethinking Rights After the Second Reconstruction — Richard Thompson Ford • A Revolution at War with Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences from Weber to Ricci — Sophia Z. Lee • Have We Moved Beyond the Civil Rights Revolution? — John D. Skrentny • Equal Protection in the Key of Respect — Deborah Hellman • Ackerman’s Brown — Randall L. Kennedy • The Anti-Humiliation Principle and Same-Sex Marriage — Kenji Yoshino • De-Schooling Constitutional Law — Bruce Ackerman The issue, the eighth and final one of Volume 123, also includes a cumulative Index to the entire volume's titles and authors. As with previous digital editions of Yale Law Journal available from Quid Pro Books, features include active Tables of Contents (including links in each Essay's own table), linked footnotes and URLs, and proper ebook and Bluebook formatting.