The Bill of Rights: A User's Guide

ISBN-13: 9780316415606 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 288 str.

Linda R. Monk; Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Opis

With a foreword by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, its highest honor for media about the law.

The Bill of Rights: A User's Guide offers a sophisticated and balanced analysis of the Bill of Rights that is accessible to everyday citizens. The book explores the history of the Bill of Rights amendment by amendment, explains how the Supreme Court has interpreted each right, and examines the role of citizens in enforcing them.

Stories of the ordinary people who made the Bill of Rights come alive are featured throughout. Among them are people like Simon Tam, whose 10-year trademark battle for his band The Slants ended in a Supreme Court victory; the 13-year old Mary Beth Tinker, whose school suspension for wearing a black armband protesting the Vietnam War prompted the Court to declare that students are also protected by the First Amendment; Clarence Earl Gideon, whose handwritten petition to the Supreme Court--sent from prison--led the Court to rule that a poor person has the right to a lawyer in felony cases; and Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who became a national leader in the civil rights movement. Such people prove that, in the words of Judge Learned Hand, "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court, can save it."

The Bill of Rights: A User's Guide explores the history, scope, and meaning of the first ten amendments--as well as of the Fourteenth Amendment, which nationalized the Bill of Rights and extended new rights of equality.