Claims Of Freedom Research Articles

Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery (review)

Reviewed by: Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery Mark A. Graber Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery. By Earl M. Maltz. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. 191. Cloth $29.95; paper $15.95.) Americans agree that the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856) was a tragic mistake, but no consensus exists on why the justices should not have declared unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise or asserted that former slaves were not American citizens. Part of the problem is ideological. Law professors are convinced that Chief Justice Roger Taney [End Page 78] reached his immoral conclusions only because he relied on the wrong theory of constitutional interpretation. Members of the general public confront problems of understanding more often than interpretation when they assess precisely where the Taney Court made a wrong turn. Dred Scott raises complex questions about choice of law, constitutional powers in the territories, birthright citizenship, and other matters that are not common topics in ordinary discourse. Worse, all nine justices wrote opinions in a dialect of nineteenth-century constitutional English that most readers find no more comprehensible than Chaucer. Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery is a first-rate introduction to the central constitutional issues the justices grappled with when deciding Dred Scott. Earl M. Maltz provides a very accessible introduction to the constitutional history of slavery, sectional politics before the Civil War, the justices who decided Dred Scott, and the issues that had to be resolved to decide that case. In Dred Scott, Maltz first takes the reader through the lawyer's arguments, explaining why both the plaintiff and defense had to frame the issues as they did. He then does the same for the judicial opinions. The main lesson the text teaches is that a morass of complex legal technicalities structure the legal strategy and judicial response to Dred Scott's claim for freedom. Many modern complaints about that decision, Maltz demonstrates, overlook matters of civil procedure or common law forms that good lawyers before the Civil War had to address. Consider how these technical legal issues influenced the celebrated Curtis dissent in Dred Scott. Contrary to common belief, Curtis did not take the position that free blacks were citizens (Justice McLean did take that position). Rather, Maltz details, Curtis maintained that free blacks were citizens of the United States only if they were born in states that regarded free blacks as state citizens. Sanborn's brief, however, asserted that no free black could be a citizen of the United States. The lawyerly Curtis insisted that the court could reach only this issue that was briefed. Jurisdiction existed if any person of color might be an American citizen. Had the Sanborn brief asserted that Dred Scott was not a citizen of the United States, Dred Scott points out, Curtis might have supported the majority position. The text comes to the conventional conclusion that Dred Scott was wrongly decided. "Ultimately," Maltz writes, "this book is the story of a colossal judicial failure" (3). Following the great weight of the scholarly literature, Dred Scott condemns both the decision the justices made and the judicial decision to [End Page 79] make any decision in Dred Scott. The book is more restrained on the former. After highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of all major opinions, Maltz mildly concludes that "Curtis clearly had the better of the argument on the larger constitutional questions" (139). Dred Scott is more concerned with the judicial belief that a broad judicial decision of any sort was appropriate. That bit of "judicial hubris," Maltz states, "reflected an overestimation of the power of the Court in the American political system" (155-56). As is the case, with all writings on Dred Scott, Maltz draws a contemporary moral. In his view, "those who embrace [Justice Taney's] vision of the judicial function do so only at their peril" (154). These arguments are reasonable and based on sound appreciation for the nuances of constitutional logics before the Civil War. Some readers may wish Dred Scott engaged some of the revisionist literature (particularly if one is the author of one of the revision works!). Still, reviewer quibbles aside, Maltz has successfully penned...

Green Paper on Policy Options for Progress Towards a European Contract Law for Consumers and Businesses What do we want?

Although based on academic background and literature, my answer to the questions posed by the European Commission turns out to be rather political as from my point of view it is impossible to address those questions in a purely technical way. Although there are other, probably more relevant, obstacles to the internal market, I consider that there is enough evidence to assume that different legislation is an obstacle well worth looking at. I begin with the discussion of goals, strictly connected to the scope of application, and move to the debate on formal/informal harmonisation of contract law. As on one side there is not enough evaluation to sustain solidly that harmonisation or unification is better that diversity that meets local preferences, and on the other side liberty, subsidiarity and proportionality claim for parties' freedom to opt for their better solution, I support the view that Member States must be able to maintain their internal law but at the same time must wide the parties' scope of options with the approval of a Regulation on European contract law. In any case, a lot of assessment should still take place.

Entrenching the establishment and free exercise of religion in the written U.K. constitution

Religions make incompatible truth claims. This was recognised by the negotiators of the constitutional settlement that created Great Britain in 1706-07. This settlement contained two (logically incompatible but politically essential) clauses that established different varieties of Christianity as the “true Protestant religion” of Scotland and England. Since the union created a free trade and free movement area, it granted some freedom of exercise of religion to those penalized by establishment. The principles of non-establishment and of free exercise of religion may set up a conflict, which only courts can resolve. We discuss recent difficult U.K. cases where claims of freedom of religion conflicted with claims of state neutrality. The entrenchment intended by the drafters of the 1707 settlement has been violated by subsequent Parliaments. It should be made explicit by a law entrenching both non-establishment and free exercise of religion in the four countries of the United Kingdom. Such a move would lay to rest the ghosts of Sir William Blackstone and A. V. Dicey.

What Religious Freedom Jurisprudence Reveals About Equality

In this article I compare jurisprudence arising under the religious freedom and the equality provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I suggest that religious freedom jurisprudence is actually more consonant with equality ideals (what Justice Peter Cory referred to as “the foundation for a just society”). I first argue that, while Canada’s approach to its constitutional equality guarantees has much to laud, establishing an equality rights claim has become increasingly complex, beset by multi-part tests and providing numerous opportunities for the state to justify discrimination. Then, I show how religious freedom jurisprudence has developed quite differently, invoking powerful purposive descriptions of the right; a clear focus on the individual; a clear recognition and respect for difference; and an expectation of compelling state justification. On the whole, Canadian courts display a sympathy to the religiously devout that often is absent in equality cases. I conclude with some observations about why it seems to be easier for courts to “get” religious freedom claims compared to equality claims (despite their many points of analytical intersection), and some thoughts on whether equality law could actually be reinvigorated by religious freedom jurisprudence. In an addendum, I consider the implications for my analysis posed by the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2009 decision in Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony.

Challenges Presented to Law and Public Norms by Claims of Freedom of Religion Arising in Increasingly Diverse Societies

Because religion is a potent force for many people, it affects the content, structure, and function of law and the law's relationship to ordering society. The complexity and variability from state to state of the relationships of religion to social, governmental, and legal systems is remarkable. This variability and complexity stems from several major influences including in particular: (1) the diversity of religions and of people's understanding of and use of those religions; and (2) the mix of religions within a particular state. As predominantly secular countries become more ethnically and religiously diverse, particularly through immigration from regions religiously different from the host country (e.g., the Muslim emigration into Christian Europe), more free exercise and accommodationist demands are being made by those whose religions are not merely a variant of the dominant religion. These demands bring new challenges and require sensitive balancing of

Watching the Watchdogs-Moral Basis for a Broadcast Regulatory Authority

Media freedom, in a liberal democracy, is linked to its social obligations of keeping the people informed and educated on events and issues in a fair, objective and unbiased way. But, changes in the media environment sometimes disturb the balance between the media's goals as an industry and its social obligations as a profession. When the media ignore its social obligations of fulfilling the public trust, especially under the driving influence of its business goals of profit prioritisation or partisan interests, national governments find opportunities to cross the threshold of the media's domain and attempt to create mechanisms to regulate their functioning. Such interventions are often viewed as attempts to negate the protection of l, and potential threats to media freedom. The Indian government's attempts to create a ‘Broadcast Regulatory Authority, ostensibly to protect the public from the negatives impacts of, what it calls the debasing media content, has induced apprehension among the media and guardians of its freedom. The Indian media's campaign against the proposed regulatory authority, seen as an expression of their genuine concern for media freedom, is termed by the government as the media's over-reaction on the issue. It is alleged that the differing interpretations of the provisions of the propose bill, leaves much scope for their misuse to curtail the hard earned media freedom, a liberal democracy cannot afford do without. In view of the existing law in India including the constitutional provisions, the landmark legal judgments, research studies, and views of experts, this paper makes an attempt to find out the rationale for any regulatory framework, both from legal and moral perspectives. This article argues that even if it is legally tenable, in no case a regulatory framework should be allowed to infringe on media freedom to an extent beyond what is reasonable under the circumstances in question. But, the onus is on the media to honor its social obligations, failing which it may face the risk of weakening its legitimate claim for freedom.

Inclusion, Accommodation, and Recognition: Accounting for Differences Based on Religion and Sexual Orientation

This Article analyzes the rights claims and theoretical frameworks deployed by Christian Right and gay rights cause lawyers in the context of gay-inclusive school programming to show how two movements with conflicting normative positions are using similar representational and rhetorical strategies. Lawyers from both movements cast constituents as vulnerable minorities in a pluralistic society, yet they do so to harness the homogenizing power of curriculum and thereby entrench a particular normative view. Exploring how both sets of lawyers construct distinct and often incompatible models of pluralism as they attempt to influence schools’ state-sponsored messages, this Article exposes the strengths as well as the limitations of both movements’ strategies. Christian Right lawyers’ free speech strategy - articulating religious freedom claims through the secular language of free speech doctrine - operates within an inclusion model of pluralism. This model stresses public participation and engagement with difference. After making significant advances over the past several years, lawyers have begun to employ the inclusion model with some success in the school programming domain, despite significant doctrinal and remedial limitations. At the same time, Christian Right lawyers assert parental rights and free exercise claims in curricular challenges. Such claims rely on an accommodation model of pluralism that permits selective withdrawal based on religious beliefs and thereby resists active engagement with difference. This strategy struggles in the face of a well-accepted view of civic education that values exposure to diversity - a view bound up with the success of the Christian Right’s inclusion model of pluralism. Gay rights lawyers respond to Christian Right claims by drawing on a left multicultural model of pluralism. This model constitutes lesbians and gay men as identity holders (rather than sex actors), and in doing so succeeds in justifying the inclusion of sexual orientation in programming that prioritizes diversity. The left multicultural claim stalls, however, when it demands the state’s affirmative cultivation of respect by asserting students’ rights to gay-inclusive instruction. In the end, both the Christian Right and gay rights movements make important advances yet face significant tensions as they craft doctrinal claims that operate within competing models of pluralism.

Allocating Ecological Space

Liberals have long been committed to two axiomatic claims about freedom: that the exercise of control within one’s private space epitomizes individual liberty, and that each person must be free to define and pursue the good life for themselves. Together, these claims form a conception of freedom as autonomy (from the Greek Auto-Nomos, giving law to oneself), conceptualized as a personal space in which each can act according to one’s own view of the good, free from external constraint. Liberal theories of justice have embraced such claims about autonomy, defining justice in terms that recognize sovereignty within one’s personal space and protect individuality. John Rawls’s primary goods, 1 Ronald Dworkin’s resources, 2 and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach 3 all focus on instrumental goods within a metric of egalitarian justice, allowing individuals full control over their personal spaces of autonomy while maintaining the bases for interpersonal comparison that distributive justice requires. This spatial conception of liberty has dominated liberal thought at least since J. S. Mill’s observation that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to attain it.” 4 Here, Mill not only defines individual liberty in terms of autonomy, but he also specifies its limits: each of us should be free to pursue our own ideas about the good within our own space, bounded only by the space of others, where our acts infringe upon their autonomy. 5 If this autonomous space is to play the role that Mill and other liberals have long assumed, it must be sufficiently large to allow for a wide range of actions and choices, allowing each to express their individuality without encountering the limits that Mill mentions and the constraints on action that they entail. If almost everything that I do impedes others from pursuing the good in their way—harming them directly, limiting their opportunities, or otherwise infringing upon their space—then my personal space becomes vanishingly small, and my liberty but a trivial abstraction. This spatial conception of freedom is challenged by analyses emerging from the ecological crisis, which offer competing accounts of personal space with quite different implications for the exercise of individual autonomy. 6 Given ecological limits, aggregate ecological space 7 (i.e., life-supporting natural resource-based goods and services, conceived in spatial terms) is finite and threatened by current patterns of over-appropriation, yielding imperatives to fairly allocate that space among various claimants, present and future. Uninhibited autonomy, as construed above, is not sustainable, justifying significant limits on both personal space and

Strader v. Graham: Kentucky's Contribution to National Slavery Litigation the the Dred Scott Decision

In 1841, three Kentucky slaves in Louisville boarded a steamboat bound for Cincinnati. Within days, they had made their way to Detroit and then to permanent freedom in Canada. Their owner, a prominent central Kentucky businessman, soon tracked them down and tried to lure them back to bondage in the United States. When these efforts failed, he sued the steamboat owners for the value of the lost slaves in a Kentucky court. After ten years of litigation, this case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court’s decision in favor of the Kentucky slaveholder would prove to be an important precedent a few years later when the Court considered the freedom claim of another slave, Dred Scott, whose case would produce perhaps the most important decision ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.The key issue in Dred Scott - how, if at all, a Negro slave could obtain his freedom by spending time on free soil - had also been considered by the Court in prior cases. This Article deals with one of these, Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. 82 (1851), the case brought by the Kentucky businessman whose slaves escaped on the defendants’ steamboat and the only Kentucky slave case ever to reach the Supreme Court.This Article provides a detailed description of Strader, including its factual background, its reflection of Kentucky slave law in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its significance for Dred Scott and other subsequent slave-related matters. Part I provides an overview of Kentucky slave law as it evolved up to the time of the Strader litigation. Part II describes Strader’s factual background and the Kentucky court decisions it produced. Part III covers the Strader case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Part IV deals with post-Strader events, including a review of the Dred Scott case and the role that the Strader decision played in that litigation. Part V provides some concluding observations about how the Strader case reflected the role of slavery, law, and lawyers in antebellum Kentucky and what Strader and Dred Scott might teach us in the modern era.

American Indian religion in the iron house: searching for ‘some accommodation’

Religious freedom claims by American Indian prisoners are disfavored in law and policy more than most prisoner civil rights claims. This disfavor reflects the continuing influence of the cultural distance between traditional Indians and Christianity – a distance with an unfortunate history from the Indian point of view. The salutary effects of Christian religion within prisons have been assumed for as long as prisons have existed; this assumption is based upon scant evidence. Treating Indian religious expression as inferior to Christian religious expression within prisons is often allowed by law, but it is insupportable in policy without reference to the historical power relationship between Indians and the dominant culture. Indian spirituality, like Christianity, can engage prisoners in the moral discourse demanded by the tenets of restorative justice. Accommodation of Indian spirituality is as much in the public interest as accommodation of religion within prisons at all.

Whose autonomy matters? Reconciling the competing claims of privacy and freedom of expression

English law has recently recognised a tort of misuse of private information through the development of the tort of breach of confidence. This paper considers the conceptual issues that arise in the particular context of cases contesting the privacy of information exchanged in an intimate relationship. The courts have said that the purpose of protecting privacy through the tort is the promotion of individual autonomy. Examining what is entailed in this approach, it is argued that cases involving shared privacies can only be understood as involving the indirect promotion of autonomy through the protection of certain socially sanctioned relationships. A framework of analysis is developed under which the underlying issues are laid bare and through which the reasoning of the courts may be understood and criticised.

Demonstrating freedom from disease using multiple complex data sources: 1: A new methodology based on scenario trees

Current methods to demonstrate zone or country freedom from disease are based on either quantitative analysis of the results of structured representative surveys, or qualitative assessments of multiple sources of evidence (including complex non-representative sources). This paper presents a methodology for objective quantitative analysis of multiple complex data sources to support claims of freedom from disease. Stochastic scenario tree models are used to describe each component of a surveillance system (SSC), and used to estimate the sensitivity of each SSC. The process of building and analysing the models is described, as well as techniques to take into account any lack of independence between units at different levels within a SSC. The combination of sensitivity estimates from multiple SSCs into a single estimate for the entire surveillance system is also considered, again taking into account lack of independence between components. A sensitivity ratio is used to compare different components of a surveillance system. Finally, calculation of the probability of country freedom from the estimated sensitivity of the surveillance system is illustrated, incorporating the use and valuation of historical surveillance evidence.

The Claim of Truth and the Claim of Freedom in Religion

The Claim of Truth and the Claim of Freedom in Religion

Students’ choices and moral growth

Can schools encourage children to become independent moral decision-makers, maintaining controlled environments suitable to instructing large numbers of children? Two opposing responses are reviewed: one holds that the road to morality is through discipline and obedience, the other through children's experimentation and choice-making. Circumventing these polarities, I look to distinctions within rules that may help in balancing claims of restraint and freedom. Using a pharmacological analogy, one might, in principle, justify ‘pills’ (discipline) for uncontrollable and/or morally trivial behaviors, but not for intentional behaviors of moral significance where volition matters. However, since we cannot permit children to choose to harm, their agency must be curbed. As a compromise, I suggest that teachers hold extended moral discussions, and involve students in rule-making and sanction-giving.

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Rachel Hope Cleves (bio) Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xix, 340. Illustrations, maps, tables. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $23.99.) Since the early nineteenth century, abolitionists and subsequent historians of the abolitionist movement have debated the relative merits of the social and political strategies of antislavery. Did the rhetorical tactic of "moral suasion" represent the best means to eliminate slavery and its attendant sins from American society, or did politics offer a more effective road? Important episodes in this nearly 200-year debate included William Lloyd Garrison's initial disparagement of political means as tainted, early twentieth-century historians' denigration of Garrison and his allies as unrealistic fanatics, the resurrection of Garrisonian means by neo-abolitionist historians of the 1960s, and most recently a renewed discussion of the question on the electronic network H-SHEAR. The proponents of moral suasion have held the dominant position in this debate since the 1960s; however, the tide may be turning. Recent volumes in defense of political abolitionism include Jonathan H. Earle's Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil (2004) and Frederick J. Blue's No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (2005). Bruce Laurie joins the fray with his stimulating new book, which argues that when antislavery activists pushed beyond Garrison by entering the political arena, they formed fertile connections with labor advocates and other democratic leaders that both advanced black civil rights and held promise for biracial economic progress. Laurie revises the familiar [End Page 495] declension narrative, which regards political antislavery as a retreat from principled moral suasion, by focusing his gaze on the positive consequences of "the politicization of abolitionism in antebellum Massachusetts" (1). Beyond Garrison is a richly detailed local history that describes both the ideological battles and the political horse-trading engaged in by antislavery politicians in antebellum Massachusetts. Laurie is most successful in the first chapters of the book, which describe how certain Massachusetts antislavery leaders made the transition from moral suasion to politics and how they used politics to advance black civil rights. This story has received less attention than it deserves. Laurie painstakingly recreates the successful political battles fought against racial segregation and anti-intermarriage laws, as well as for personal liberty laws. He impressively recovers the significant role that black activists played in encouraging antislavery politicians to pursue a civil rights agenda. However, Laurie reserves the majority of the credit for the agenda's passage to the members of the Liberty Party. Here Laurie challenges the common assumption that abolitionist politics were ineffective and uses the occasion to make a jab at the "unabashedly self-serving" William Lloyd Garrison, who tried to take some credit for the accomplishments (112). There are weaknesses to this argument. First, Laurie fails to consider how the moral suasion practiced throughout the 1830s may have set the stage for the Liberty Party's political victories. Second, the successful battle against railroad segregation in Massachusetts cannot be considered strictly a political victory. Legislation did not force railroads to abandon segregated seating for African Americans; railroads did so voluntarily in response to a combination of political pressure and community pressure. The book's latter chapters describe the connections that antislavery leaders formed with political labor activists, and the episodes of cooperation and conflict between these two reform movements. Laurie argues persuasively that some Liberty party leaders supported labor reform and gave it "a useful political partner, raising its profile in public and strengthening its hand in party politics" (135). He is less convincing in his attempt to show that antislavery sentiment had strength among working-class labor reformers. Laurie's examples of workingmen's rhetoric against "slavery" can easily be read as intended to enhance the claims of white freedom without offering any true critique of black slavery. Subsequent chapters on Free Soilism enrich this story of antislavery–labor cooperation. Laurie argues that Free Soilers in Massachusetts were not [End Page 496] virulent racists, but racial paternalists who campaigned for black equal rights (179). Ultimately however, he concedes that "cultural" racial politics divided laborites and antislavery activists, trumping their...

Searching for 'Some Accommodation': American Indian Religion in the Iron House

Religious freedom claims by American Indian prisoners are disfavored in law and policy, even more so than most other prisoner civil rights claims. This disfavor reflects the continuing influence of the cultural distance between traditional Indians and Christianity, a distance with an unfortunate history from the Indian point of view. The salutary effects of Christian religion within prisons have been assumed for as long as prisons have existed, an assumption based upon scant evidence. Treating Indian religious expression as inferior to Christian religious expression within prisons is often allowed by law, but it is insupportable in policy without reference to the historical power relationship between Indians and the dominant culture. Indian spirituality, like Christianity, can engage prisoners in the moral discourse demanded by the tenets of restorative justice. Accommodation of Indian spirituality is as much in the public interest as accommodation of religion within prisons at all.

J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and the Thin Theory of the Good

As elsewhere in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction, Michael K’s body is a central repository of signification. His life-threatening thinness operates as a supple metaphor for the novel’s ambivalent relationship with liberal doctrine. As a marker of the staggering cost of K’s commitment to self-determination, it highlights the suffering that attends a liberal prioritization of freedom over welfare. Yet in spite of its unflinching acknowledgement of liberalism’s limitations, the novel anchors its deepest moral convictions in Kantian and Rawlsian liberal doctrine. Coetzee’s quarrel with communitarianism and qualified endorsement of liberal values are traced back to the complicity he sees between communitarian discourse and the theoretical underpinnings of apartheid. Life & Times of Michael K exposes the alliance between communitarian and consequentialist ethical principles, and reveals the ways in which these principles abet oppression and exploitation by prioritizing the maximization of good outcomes over the claims of freedom.

At play in Belfast.

The Psychological Development of Girls and Women: Rethinking Change in Time. Sheila Greene. New York: Routledge. 2003. 167 pp. ISBN 0-415-17862-2. $27.95 (hardcover). Developmental Psychology, long considered a policy science, has traditionally focused on individual development and progression. But what is that progression aiming toward? How influential are the elements of prediction and control? In The Psychological Development of Girls and Women: Rethinking Change in Time, Sheila Greene argues for a critical development perspective that she believes would provide the framework for understanding the psychological development of girls and in ways that mainstream developmental has heretofore failed to provide. Rather than relying on the traditional view of development as determined, given, universal, and natural, Greene suggests an understanding that views development as historically and culturally contingent and emergent. She stresses that the typically andocentric nature of traditional developmental must be acknowledged and eliminated if we are to have an understanding of feminine that benefits and eliminates gender blindness and bias. And although she recognizes that there may be something to be gained from observing a particular phenomenon at a specific juncture in time, Greene presses us to consider the significance of the passage of time, of timing, age, growth, aging and mortality (p. 1) with regard to the psychological development of girls and women. As with other professional and powerful traditional theories, Developmental Theory has previously been impervious to challenges and immune to introspection. This can be both dangerous and derisive. Greene argues that many of the traditional theories are inapplicable to or restrict their potential because of their parochial and patriarchal nature. As an example, from the standpoint of goal setting, the ways in which fashion their short- and long-term life goals is often directly related to the way that girls and tend to internalize the expectations set by society (e.g., the understanding of what it means to be a good mother and a good wife). The examination of the tensions and debates within developmental is, according to Greene, an antidevelopmental developmental (p. 37). The fact is, no one grows up or develops in a historical or social vacuum. Class, race, culture, and gender are all defining and integral aspects of development and, according to Greene, despite claims of impartiality and freedom from ideology, has been employed frequently and uncritically as a discipline of social control in schools, mental hospitals, prisons, and even, most insidiously, in the home (p. 27). Greene engages the binary opposition of the nature versus nurture/biological versus environmental debates in her discussion of biology as destiny, which she claims ignores the possibility of personal agency, as both subject and agent, and disallows individuals the ability and right to reconstruct their own histories and shape their own futures. Instead of erring on the side of either extreme, the answer, says Greene, is to think in terms of interaction. She also acknowledges the importance of keeping an open mind about the extent to which our pasts may influence who we are in the present. In the end, although we are motivated by our need for predictability and continuity, it is clear that we can neither disregard nor overemphasize history when we are theorizing development and the construction of self. Greene argues that within the disciplines labeled psychology of women and feminist psychology-and, by extension, the interdisciplinary field of women's studies-there is a need for a (more) clearly articulated developmental perspective (p. 36). She devotes an entire chapter to an examination of the traditional theories and subtheories that discuss girls' and women's with reference to origins, formation, socialization, assumed developmental pathways, tasks or goals, and changes with age or in time, and another chapter to theories written from a woman-centered perspective. …

Accountability, Autonomy, and Academic Freedom in Educator Preparation Programs

As external pressures on teacher education programs mount, including recent federal critiques and requirements, institutions and their faculty must consider how they will respond to calls for increased accountability. This article discusses the legal and policy issues associated with the academic freedom claims that might arise in the current atmosphere of increased accountability and diminished autonomy for teacher education programs. It assesses the institutional academic freedom interests of both public and private institutions. It also addresses the potential outcome of academic freedom claims by individual faculty.

Telling Stories for Liberty

This essay reviews David Bernstein's You Can't Say That!: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws. It uses Professor Bernstein's book to explore how a principle of free speech can be reconciled with a harm principle when persons claim that expression harms them. It suggests that reconciling such claims leads to a more utilitarian approach to free speech problems than the book employs. The essay also suggests that the book's narrative (storytelling) strategy is ill-suited to advance libertarian ends, and that no plausible free speech principle can support a general claim for freedom from government regulation.