Civil Rights and Liberty in a Digital Age

Mr. Kamal Terbah, University of Algiers 2, 2023

The United States is a country where civil liberties are highly respected. Many scholars underscore the role of the Bill of Rights, a legal document added in 1791 to the Constitution, in preserving liberties. However, other scholars undermine the value of this legal document. This research is aimed to explore the value of the Bill of rights defending an overall claim suggesting that it is the spirit of the Bill of Rights and the liberties it initially defined in its Ten Amendments that has permanently guaranteed fundamental freedoms, allowed the balance between citizens’ rights and government power as it has permitted addressing such issues as race relations. This research demonstrates the link between laws protecting civil liberties and the Bill of Rights through a case study. In order to show the role of Bill of Rights in the protection of civil liberties, we choose to examine the link between the Bill of Rights and the different laws issued through different periods of time to integrate the African Americans as citizens with equal rights in the American society. Using a historical interpretive analysis and relying on political theory as defined by John Locke and Jean Jacque Rousseau, this dissertation has demonstrated that the Bill of Rights has played a crucial role in the protection of civil liberties throughout time. Keywords: Civil liberties, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution, civil rights, African American integration.

This article reviews two recent United States Supreme Court decisions concerning civil rights: Shelby County v. Holder, and United States v. Windsor. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Court invalidated an important section of the Voting Rights Act, which designated certain jurisdictions as requiring " preclearance " for changes in their election laws. In United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional a provision of the Defense of Marriage Act which defined marriage as between a man and a woman for the purpose of federal law. This article identifies two points of commonality between these two decisions: an emphasis on federalism, and on a formal conception of equality. It concludes by suggesting that certain aspects of the decision in United States v. Windsor might point towards a more substantive conception of equality.

United States v. Windsor (2013), the United States Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), represented a pivotal moment for advocates of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community in America. In striking down Section 3 of the law, the ruling declared unconstitutional the provisions that barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages (Jaeger-Fine, 2015). In its wake, the opinion also triggered numerous instances of disobedience by public officials, particularly at the state level, who were tasked with enforcing state laws recognizing marriage as the union between one man and one woman, a concept now in conflict with the U.S. Constitution. The decision also generated conflicting attitudes among the broad spectrum of political actors who had an opinion to give and did not mince words while giving it. In essence, this essay will consider two questions: first, whether the individual approach to ethical conduct on the part of political actors played any role, either positive or negative, in awarding same-sex couples equal protection under the law. Based on the concepts of administrative ethics (Thompson, 1985) and ethical approaches to political conduct (Northouse, 2013), I conclude that the actors involved did have both negative and positive impacts in awarding same-sex couples the legal protections found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The second question is whether the inability of policy makers to keep pace with rapid social change presented exigent conditions for the state government to implement social policies aimed to provide same-sex couples with equal protection under the law. Following the notions of agenda setting and policy formation (Kingdon, 1984), as well as theories regarding policy design and tools in policy decision-making (Birkland, 2011), I conclude that policy-making processes at the state level were slow to adapt to a time of rapid social change and the particular conditions that made such a change inevitable. The fact that providing same-sex couples with equal protection under the law was a dilemma decided by judges instead of legislators proved to be a prime example of the disconnect between policy making and social change.

Brooklyn law review, 2014

Robin West † Corey Brettschneider's When the State Speaks confronts a core dilemma for liberalism and indeed for liberal states: how (and whether) liberal states should respond to the existence of hateful speech and practices, and the groups that sponsor and promote them. Brettschneider advocates for an approach that checks the damage the hateful speech does to underlying liberal principles of free and equal citizenship, while at the same time respecting the rights of the speakers and groups that engage in it. He rejects what he considers to be the two polar responses that pervade state responses, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, to this dilemma, and that virtually exhaust the scholarly treatment of the issue, at least in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. On the one hand, Brettschneider rejects the civil libertarian (or "neutralist") claim, popular in the United States, that private speech is just that-private-and therefore of no concern or relevance to public values, public deliberation, or public law. He likewise rejects the "militant democrats" (his phrase), some feminists, and most of the European liberal democracies, who argue that private hateful speech has very harmful and fully intended consequences and should be banned or censored in some meaningful way to stop its noxious spread. 1 These two poles, Brettschneider argues, veer toward one or the other of two dystopian visions of the relation of the state to its citizens. The "militant egalitarian's" view, which urges greater criminalization of hate speech, risks what he calls the "Invasive State," meaning a state overly involved in our private † Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Part of this review has been published as a part of Liberal Responsibilities, 49 TULSA L. REV. 393 (2013).

The Yale Law Journal, 1981

The Yale Law Journal Connecticut, 2 Eisenstadt v. Baird,' Roe v. Wade, 4 and Doe v. Commonwealth's Attorney. 5 The judges and scholars who support judicial intervention usually acknowledge that the rights at stake-variously described in terms of privacy, procreational choice, sexual autonomy, lifestyle choices, and intimate association-are not specified by the text or original history of the Constitution. They argue that the judiciary is nonetheless authorized, if not duty-bound, to protect individua,5 against government interference with these rights, which can be discovered in conventional morality or derived through the methods of philosophy and adjudication. The critics argue that judicial review may be exercised only to enforce explicit constitutional provisions or to ensure the integrity of representative government. They deny that shared social values or fundamental rights exist or, in any case, that courts can ascertain them. The fundamental rights controversy deserves a place in a symposium on legal scholarship: It is concerned with issues that lie at the core of contemporary constitutional discourse-judicial methodology, institutional competence, and democratic theory. My own scholarly agenda also influenced this choice of topic. Several years ago, I started work on an affirmative theory of constitutional decisionmaking based on interpretation-broadly conceived-of the history, structure, and values of American society. I began by examining, and rejecting, "originalist" constitutional interpretation (that is, interpretation rooted in the text and original understanding of the Constitution). 6 The publication of John Hart Ely's important proposals for value-neutral "representation-reinforcing" modes of judicial review 7 occasioned a detour, which confirmed my belief that such process-oriented strate-2. 381 U.S. 479 (1965). Griswold held that a Connecticut statute prohibiting the use of contraceptives could not be applied to married couples. Justice Douglas's opinion for the Court relied on "penumbras" of various provisions of the Bill of Rights. Concurring Justices invoked the Ninth Amendment and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court has not since recurred to penumbral analysis. 3. 405 U.S. 438 (1972). Eisenstadt invalidated a statute that, in effect, prohibited distributing contraceptives to unmarried persons. The Court remarked that "[i]f the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." Id. at 453. 4. 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Roe invalidated a Texas statute prohibiting abortions before as well as after viability. 5. 403 F. Supp. 1199 (E.D. Va. 1975), alf'd mem., 425 U.S. 901 (1976). Doe sustained Virginia's sodomy statute as applied to private consensual homosexual conduct. The Supreme Court affirmed without opinion. Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens voted to note probable jurisdiction and set the case for argument. 6.

The University of Notre Dame Australia Law Review, 2015

This article critically analyses the recent US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v Hodges, the samesex marriage case. The court in Obergefell put a stop to the democratic process by removing an important issue from the realm of democratic deliberation. These unelected judges held that their nation's federal constitution should 'evolve' in a way that is supported by neither the document's language, nor its history or authority. In short, they have imposed their worldview on the people at the expense of federalism and the democratic process. This is why Justice Alito was so correct to state that such an exercise of raw judicial power 'usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage', adding that it evinces 'the deep and perhaps irremediable corruption of [the American] legal culture's conception of constitutional interpretation'.

Before the American Civil War, very few U.S. Supreme Court cases dealt with the Bill of Rights. It was not until the 20th century that the courts began to deal extensively with the Bill of Rights, and because of the court enforcement of the rights embodied in that document, the Bill of Rights has come to be the best-known part of the United States Constitution. There have been thousands of cases interpreting and applying the Bill of Rights in the 20th century, and there will undoubtedly be thousands more as our era continues to be permeated with “rights talk.” This raises two important questions. First, why did Bill of Rights litigation wait a century to really begin to play an important part in American culture? Second, does the upsurge in judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights indicate a corresponding increase in liberty? This essay examines both of these questions by examining the interplay between personal rights and structural constraints on the federal government throughout American constitutional history.

Academia.edu, 2024

The doctrine of judicial review in the United States protects natural and analogous civil rights from erasure by hostile democratic, theocratic, or authoritarian forces. This essay discusses what the contours of some of these rights are and how the judicial system does, or should, safeguard them. (minor edits on January 7, 2025)

Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&amp;"/> Society Review, 2005

Tulsa Law Review, 2015