The US Supreme Court has decided that states may require parental involvement in the abortion decisions of pregnant minors as long as minors have the opportunity to petition for a bypass of parental involvement. This title demonstrates that safeguards promised by parental involvement laws do not exist in practice.
The First Decade of the Americans With Disabilities Act
Signed into law in July 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became effective two years later, and court decisions about the law began to multiply in the middle of the decade. This book presents the first legislative history of the enactment of the ADA in Congress and analyzes the first decade of judicial decisions under the act.
Building on the insights of both disability studies and civil rights scholars, this work frames the author's examination of disability harassment on the premise that disabled people are members of a minority group that must negotiate an artificial yet often damaging environment of physical and attitudinal barriers.
The First Amendment is the principle guarantor of speech rights in the United States, but the court's interpretations of it often privilege the interests of media owners over those of the broader citizenry. In Speech Rights in America, Laura Stein argues that such rulings prevent the First Amendment from performing its critical role as a protector ......
Many believe that the Fourth Amendment is a poor bulwark against state tyrannies. Here, the author looks at its history. He presents two arguments, first, the original Fourth Amendment served important political functions and secondly, the Amendment's meaning changed when the Fourteenth Amendment was created to give teeth to outlawing slavery.
Congress, the Constitution, and the Protection of Individual Rights
Assesses Congress's historical role in interpreting the Constitution and protecting the individual rights of citizens, challenging conventional wisdom that courts, not legislatures, are best suited for this role. This work examines three historical eras: Reconstruction, the New Deal era, and Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
Shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on the perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which the author calls juridical racialism. This book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences.
A Comparative Legal Analysis of the Freedom of Speech
Compares the First Amendment with free speech law in Japan, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom - countries that are all considered modern democracies, but have radically different understandings of what constitutes free speech.
