Constructing Civil Liberties

This book provides a revisionist account of the genealogy of contemporary constitutional law and morals.

This book is a revisionist account of the development of the Supreme Court's modern civil liberties and civil rights jurisprudence. It explains that jurisprudence is the outgrowth of a sequence of highly particular progressive-reformist ideological currents, that formed the modern American state.

Contemporary liberal thinkers commonly suppose that there is something in principle unjust about the legal prohibition of putatively victimless immoralities. Against the prevailing liberal view, Robert P. George defends the proposition that `moral laws' can play a legitimate, if subsidiary, role in preserving the `moral ecology' of the cultural environment in which people make the morally significant choices by which they form their characters and influence, for good or ill, the moral lives of others. George shows that a defence of morals legislation is fully compatible with a `pluralistic perfectionist' political theory of civil liberties and public morality.

An internationally distinguished team of contributors explore the richness, diversity and complexity of ideas about freedom across early modern Europe.

Freedom, today perceived simply as a human right, was a continually contested idea in the early modern period. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe an international group of scholars explore the richness, diversity and complexity of thinking about freedom in the shaping of modernity. Volume 1 examines debates about religious and constitutional liberties, as well as exploring the tensions between free will and divine omnipotence across a continent of proliferating religious denominations. Volume 2 considers free persons and free states, examining differing views about freedom of thought and action and their relations to conceptions of citizenship. Debates about freedom have been fundamental to the construction of modern Europe, but represent a part of our intellectual heritage that is rarely examined in depth. These volumes provide materials for thinking in fresh ways not merely about the concept of freedom, but how it has come to be understood in our own time.

Originally published in 2006, the Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties, is a comprehensive 3 volume set covering a broad range of topics in the subject of American Civil Liberties. The book covers the topic from numerous different areas including freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly and petition. The Encyclopedia also addresses areas such as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, slavery, censorship, crime and war. The book’s multidisciplinary approach will make it an ideal library reference resource for lawyers, scholars and students.

"This volume will be of great interest to scholars in the civil liberties subfield. It is consciously designed to overrepresent new developments in an effort to stimulate work in subjects not now adequately treated, as well as to encourage further policy analysis...This volume should be read by serious scholars in the field who seek to keep abreast of latest developments."—PERSPECTIVE