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civil liberties

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    7/15/2022

    Review: David Sehat on the Struggle to Make a Secular America

    by Johann N. Neem

    In "This Earthly Frame," Sehat examines the way that activists in the 20th Century pushed the nation from an implicit privileging of Protestant Christianity toward a posture of "negative secularism" that separated the functions of government from doctrinal belief, and the transience of that victory. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    8/4/2022

    The Coming Pregnancy Surveillance State Will Bring "Homeland Security" to Women's Bodies

    by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

    The Dobbs ruling puts longstanding racist and nationalist beliefs that white women's reproductive labor is the price of their citizenship, and punitive controls on women of color, on collision course with the modern capacity of digital surveillance, threatening the criminalization of any miscarried pregnancy. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Globe
    8/1/2022

    The Demise of the Church-State Wall

    by Steven V. Mazie

    A political scientist and court correspondent says that SCOTUS has adopted a radical version of the "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment that makes a mockery of the historic separation of religious and political authority. 

  • SOURCE: NPR
    6/23/2022

    Mary Ziegler: Right Won't Stop at Roe

    Law professor Mary Ziegler explains how the anti-abortion movement upended the GOP establishment and helped push the courts to the right. Her new book is Dollars for Life.

  • SOURCE: Salon
    5/14/2022

    We're Facing the Results of the Dems' Retreat from Secularism

    by Jacques Berlinerblau

    By trying to match the Republicans on bringing Christian faith into policy, Democrats abandoned the difficult but necessary struggles to define how a diverse society protects religious freedom for majority and minority faiths – and those of no faith. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    4/21/2022

    How the Public Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Wiretapping

    by Andrew Lanham

    Brian Hochman shows that the white backlash to civil rights and racial justice protests helped to undermine longstanding civil libertarian opposition to electronic surveillance and normalize the idea of the government spying on Americans. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    4/7/2022

    How Rights Went Right

    by David Cole

    Is an all-or-nothing view of constitutional rights at the root of growing cultural clashes pitting civil rights against the free exercise of religion? A new book suggests alternatives. 

  • 3/20/2022

    On the Illogic of War

    by Don Fraser

    The logic of war rejects dissent and the moderating influence of political concerns in the pursuit of destruction, and liberal democracies aren't exempt. 

  • SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
    3/17/2022

    Russian Academics See "No Future" at Home

    While many Western academics have focused on the danger faced by Ukrainian scholars, it is clear that the domestic politics of Russia are increasingly dangerous for academic freedom as well. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    3/7/2022

    The "Who Cares if You're Innocent" Project on the Right

    Recent Senate hearings for Biden's court nominees, and the opinions of some Supreme Court justices on criminal cases, suggest that constitutional protections for the right to counsel are in jeopardy, says legal historian Sara Mayeux. 

  • SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
    2/24/2022

    Lessons From the Struggle Against the Old McCarthyism

    by Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin

    For a Texas professor, the Lieutenant Governor's push to abolish tenure and punish faculty for teaching certain ideas calls to mind the experiences of his grandparents in the heyday of McCarthy and HUAC. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    11/17/2021

    Law Enforcement Has Long Practiced Double Standards for Activists

    by Denise Lynn

    Nobody should be shocked that the FBI has aggressively surveilled Black Lives Matter organizers while deciding that the online organizing of the January 6 attack on the Capitol was protected speech; this double standard has characterized law enforcement's approach to racial justice protest. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    9/9/2021

    9/11 Forever

    by Joseph Margulies

    "By creating the impression that the stakes were not merely consequential but existential, the attacks of September 11 normalized previously unimaginable cruelty."