When preserving our history, what do we choose to value, why, and who decides?Honorable Mention for the National Council on Public History Book Award of the National Council on Public HistoryIn 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar caught the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest...

The essays in Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education reflect diverse perspectives on one of the most pressing issues in higher education--the controversies over freedom of speech and its relation to intellectual diversity. Does the First Amendment apply on campuses and do its principles clarify or obscure the issues surrounding campus speech? What, after all, is the basis for those principles, and how do they relate to the purposes of the university? Is free speech trul...

In Prejudicial Appearances noted legal scholar Robert C. Post argues modern American antidiscrimination law should not be conceived as protecting the transcendental dignity of individual persons but instead as transforming social practices that define and sustain potentially oppressive categories like race or gender. Arguing that the prevailing logic of American antidiscrimination law is misleading, Post lobbies for deploying sociological understandings to reevaluate the antidiscr...

When preserving our history, what do we choose to value, why, and who decides?Honorable Mention for the National Council on Public History Book Award of the National Council on Public HistoryIn 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar caught the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest...

An impassioned argument for the role of courts as a moral and social agent for change and protecting the vulnerable The Supreme Court long considered its highest mission to be the protection of individual liberty from intrusion by government, but the court shifted its focus to social and economic equality. Constitutional scholar Robert A. Burt explores this shift and its implications, especially for the legal protection of the vulnerable. Crucial to Burt’s perspect...

Civil Society and Government brings together an unprecedented array of political, ethical, and religious perspectives to shed light on the complex and much-debated relationship between civil society and the state. Some argue that civil society is a bulwark against government; others see it as an indispensable support for government. Civil society has been portrayed both as a independent of the state and as dependent upon it. This book reveals the extraordinary diversity of views o...

A leading American legal scholar offers a surprising account of the incompleteness of prevailing theories of freedom of speech. Robert C. Post shows that the familiar understanding of the First Amendment, which stresses the “marketplace of ideas” and which holds that "everyone is entitled to an opinion," is inadequate to create and preserve the expert knowledge that is necessary for a modern democracy to thrive. For a modern society reliably to answer such questions as whether nicotine cau...

The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down a federal prohibition on independent corporate campaign expenditures, is one of the most controversial opinions in recent memory. Defenders of the First Amendment greeted the ruling with enthusiasm, while advocates of electoral reform recoiled in disbelief. Robert C. Post offers a new constitutional theory that seeks to reconcile these sharply divided camps.Post interprets...

In the new edition of this widely praised text, Alan Aldridge examines the complex realities of religious belief, practice and institutions. Religion is a powerful and controversial force in the contemporary world, even in supposedly secular societies. Almost all societies seek to cultivate religions and faith communities as sources of social stability and engines of social progress. They also try to combat real and imagined abuses and excess, regulating cults that brainwash vulnerable peo...

"Illuminating. . . . [Tribe and Matz] offer well-crafted overviews of key cases decided by the Roberts Court [and] chart the Supreme Court's conservative path." — Chicago TribuneFrom Citizens United to its momentous rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has profoundly affected American life. Yet the court remains a mysterious institution, and the motivations of the nine men and women who serve for ...

Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism--and certain minority group rights in particular--make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there ...

Archbishop Rowan Williams is the most gifted Anglican priest of his generation. His views are consistent and orthodox and yet he has been consistently misunderstood - especially in relation to his views on contemporary society, public morality and the common good.In this, the final published work of his Archepiscopate, Dr Williams has assembled a series of chapters on matters of immediate public concern and the relationship of Christianity to these issues. Among his topics are 'Has...