Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Civil Rights

Romero examines the extent to which majority American opinion has shaped Congressional and Supreme Court responses to civil rights issues. She provides an institutionally oriented history of civil rights policy as well as an examination of the validity of the blueprint for our national government. In Romero's view, the design of the government, as articulated in "The Federalist," was meant to provide a balance between a facilitation of the majoritarian democratic process and protection of the rights of minorities. The struggle for civil rights reform represents perhaps the best modern test...

Tensions between China and Taiwan are not likely to abate in the foreseeable future. The question of Taiwan's sovereignty is the major point of friction, and the continuing impasse between China and Taiwan is worrisome. Zagoria presents perspectives from Washington, Beijing, and Taipei on cross-strait tensions, exploring ways to break the current standoff. Tensions between China and Taiwan are not likely to abate in the foreseeable future. The question of Taiwan's sovereignty is the major point of friction, and the continuing impasse between China and Taiwan is worrisome. Should critical...

What happens when two deeply held American values, freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination, clash? In any well-established democratic society, people have the right to free speech as well as the right to equal treatment and protection under the law. But when one person's speech harms another person on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, it may qualify as hate speech and be subject to restriction. Cortese argues that restricting hate speech does not violate the guiding principle behind the First Amendment, but he is not eager to see more...

No fight for civil liberties ever stays won, wrote Roger Baldwin (1884-1981) in 1971. He was in a position to know. After working hard to preserve the right of Americans to free expression during World War I, he founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. The ACLU quickly became, and remains to this day, the staunchest defender of American civil liberties. Woody Klein has selected from Baldwin's vast writings those essays that are most pertinent to the civil liberties debate today. In each chapter these writings focus on a particular theme, such as national security or invasion of...

In today's globalized society, the war on terror has negatively affected privacy rights not just in the United States, but everywhere. When privacy rights are curtailed around the world, American efforts to spread freedom and democracy are hindered, and as a consequence, Americans are less secure in the world. Ironically, the erosion of individual privacy rights, here and abroad, has been happening in the name of enhancing national security. This book sheds light on this apparent contradiction, and argues that governments must do more to preserve privacy rights while endeavoring to protect...

"Breastfeeding Rights in the United States" shows that the right to breastfeed in this country exists only in a negative sense: you can do it unless someone takes you to court. Kedrowski and Lipscomb catalog and analyze all the laws, policies, judicial opinions, cultural mores, and public attitudes that bear on breastfeeding in America. They then explore the classic double bind: social norms promulgated by the medical and public health establishment say breast is best; but social practices in the workplace and in public spaces make breastfeeding difficult. Aggravating the double bind is...

Many years before the U.S. military had to deal with the repercussions of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the U.S. armed forces were vigorously engaged in helping their Latin American counterparts to recognize the strategic imperatives of respecting human rights on the battlefield. Before Iraqi accusations of massacre at Haditha forced the U.S. military to again scramble to defend its honor and reputation, U.S. forces in Latin America were more than a decade into repairing their image after taking the blame for numerous human rights crises. Indeed, U.S. military relations with Latin...

Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity.

The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin...

From Justice Department officials seizing people's homes based on mere rumors to the IRS and its master plan to prohibit the nation's self-employed from working for themselves to the perpetrators of the Waco siege, government officials are tearing the Bill of Rights to pieces. Today's citizen is now more likely than ever to violate some unknown law or regulation and be placed at the mercy of an administrator or politician hungering for publicity. Unfortunately, the only way many government agencies can measure their "public service" is by the number of citizens they harass, hinder,...

Never afraid to take on tough cases or tackle difficult issues, here in From Freedom to Slavery Gerry Spence comes at us uncensored, with his passions on fire. In this underground bestseller, which has come to define Spence's political philosophy, he speaks out against the destructive forces in America today-forces of government and corporate tyranny that are robbing us of our freedom-and he warns us that time is running out.

In a dramatic new chapter, presented for the first time in a trade paperback edition, Spence recounts in astonishing detail the government shoot-out at...

Steinberg addresses such questions as: How did the notion of a social contract develop? What did social contract mean to Locke and Rousseau? Can social contract describe the working basis of representative democracy?