The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over themovement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past twodecades. How the civil rights movement is currently being rememberedin American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the commontheme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in waysand for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - throughmemorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even streetnames.

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.

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.

From the Supreme Court's decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1955 to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968--African American students, lawyers, ministers and communities conducted a successful nonviolent campaign against the system of American apartheid in eleven states. This work is organized into four sections. The first describes apartheid in the U.S. before Brown v. Board of Education. The causes of the revolution--the enforcement of apartheid laws by state governments, courts, police, and the KKK--are also analyzed. The second presents 54 confrontations in the struggle for Civil Rights--including court cases, boycotts, sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, and the desegregation of cities and schools--from the Moton High student strike (in Farmville, Virginia) in 1951 to 1969's hospital workers' strike in Charleston. The third is a series of 60 biographical profiles of leaders giving their educational and civil rights achievements. This section also includes a list of 40 historically significant activist organizations. The fourth section discusses six important Civil Rights laws and concludes with the general accomplishments of the struggle.

"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.

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 most dramatic change in American society in the last forty years has been the explosive growth of personal rights, a veritable "rights revolution" that is perceived by both conservatives and liberals as a threat to traditional values and our sense of community. Is it possible that our pursuit of personal rights is driving our country toward moral collapse? In The Rights Revolution, Samuel Walker answers this question with an emphatic no. The "rights revolution," says Walker, is the embodiment of the American ideals of morality and community. He argues that the critics of personal rights--from conservatives such as Robert Bork to liberals such as Michael Sandel--often forget the blatant injustices perpetrated against minorities such as women, homosexuals, African-Americans, and mentally handicapped citizens before the civil ights movement. They attack "identity politics" policies such as affirmative action, but fail to offer any reasonable solution to the dilemma of how to overcome exclusion in a society with such a powerful legacy of discrimination. Communitarians, who offer the most comprehensive alternative to a rights-oriented society, rarely define what they mean by community. What happens when conflicts arise between different notions of community? Walker concedes that the expansion of individual rights does present problems, but insists that the gains far outweigh the losses. And he reminds us that the absolute protection of our individual rights is our best defense against discrimination and injustice. The Rights Revolution is an impassioned call to honor the personal rights of all American citizens, and to embrace an enriched sense of democracy, tolerance, and community in our nation.

In the wake of the black civil rights movement, other disadvantaged groups of Americans began to make headway--Latinos, women, Asian Americans, and the disabled found themselves the beneficiaries of new laws and policies--and by the early 1970s a minority rights revolution was well underway. In the first book to take a broad perspective on this wide-ranging and far-reaching phenomenon, John D. Skrentny exposes the connections between the diverse actions and circumstances that contributed to this revolution--and that forever changed the face of American politics. Though protest and lobbying played a role in bringing about new laws and regulations--touching everything from wheelchair access to women's athletics to bilingual education--what Skrentny describes was not primarily a bottom-up story of radical confrontation. Rather, elites often led the way, and some of the most prominent advocates for expanding civil rights were the conservative Republicans who later emerged as these policies' most vociferous opponents. This book traces the minority rights revolution back to its roots not only in the black civil rights movement but in the aftermath of World War II, in which a world consensus on equal rights emerged from the Allies' triumph over the oppressive regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. It also contrasts failed minority rights development for white ethnics and gays/lesbians with groups the government successfully categorized with African Americans. Investigating these links, Skrentny is able to present the world as America's leaders saw it; and so, to show how and why familiar figures--such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and, remarkably enough, conservatives like Senator Barry Goldwater and Robert Bork--created and advanced policies that have made the country more egalitarian but left it perhaps as divided as ever.