The fundamental freedoms of speech, conscience, privacy, and religion are now an essential part of the fabric of contemporary society, set down in our most basic laws and regularly invoked in our political and cultural debates. These freedoms play a vital role in securing the spaces and opportunities within which people are able to pursue their own lives in their own ways.
Independence of Mind takes this accepted thought a step further, by exploring the ways in which the fundamental freedoms help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions...

Timothy Macklem argues that the heart of discrimination lies not in unfavorable comparisons with the treatment and opportunities that men enjoy, but rather, in a denial of resources and opportunities that women need to lead successful and meaningful lives. This work promises to be a milestone in the debate about gender equality and will interest students and professionals concerned with legal theory and gender studies.

We live in a moral world in which reasons come in different kinds as well as different weights, so that the claims of one reason upon us are often different from but no greater than the claims of some other reason. Yet law, in its self-presentation and in theoretical accounts of it, proceeds as if its rational pull was conclusive, as if there were no sensible alternative to compliance with its terms. In itself that should not be surprising: each of us often acts as if the reasons that animate us were morally determinative. Why should law operate in any other way? Yet we know that in fact...

How can law help build community? Don't people typically have good reason to pursue their own courses at the cost of life in common? This book goes beyond the familiar debates in jurisprudence, exploring the ways in which the rational appeal of law requires the support of other means of persuasion, most obviously enforcement, but also beguilement.