Expansion Of Civil Rights Research Articles

The afterlives of political violence in Argentina: The gendered body and everyday cruelty

AbstractWhile the last decade in Argentina saw an expansion of civil rights and an increased awareness of gendered violence, prison conditions for women deteriorated. A prominent example took place in Buenos Aires in May 2014 when thirty women in ‘Unidad 31’ were violently transferred to make space for men convicted of crimes against humanity during the last military dictatorship (1976‐1983). This event reveals how the repercussions of the last military dictatorship continue to unfold, displaying new iterations of military power. As former military men settled into a women's prison, the privileges of high‐ranking men expose how the afterlives of political violence reproduce gendered inequities in the prison system and, more broadly, in Argentine society. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork (2014‐2017), I consider how acts of resistance carried out by feminist collectives expose historical trauma and contemporary expressions of political violence.

The New Dread, Part I: The Judicial Overthrow of the Reasonableness Standard in Police Shooting Cases

This Article series argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s excessive force jurisprudence from Graham v. Connor to the present has undermined the objectivity of the reasonableness standard. In its place, the Court has erected a standard that reflects modern conservative political ideology, including race conservatism, law-and-order, increased police discretion, and the deconstruction of the Warren Court’s expansion of civil rights and civil liberties. Indeed, the Court, dominated by law-and-order conservatives, is one of the greatest triumphs of modern conservatism, which developed as a backlash against various social movements like the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the spontaneous urban rebellions that characterized the decade.Part I of this Article series examines fear from a biological, political, and sociological perspective. It highlights how most Americans impute reasonability to statistically unjustifiable perceptions of danger. Part I also examines the concept of reasonableness and analyzes the native and inevitable partiality of the standard. Finally, Part I explores the relationship between the social value of unarmed victims of deadly force and the perceived reasonableness of an officer’s use of such force. It posits an inverse relationship between the perceived social status of the victim and the degree of statistical unreasonableness the law is willing to tolerate.The lower the victim’s rank on America’s racial hierarchy—the hierarchy created by nineteenth century pseudo-scientist Samuel Morton to justify slavery—the more likely decisionmakers are to find a statistically unjustifiable fear to be reasonable. African Americans are ranked the lowest. The same presumption of Black inferiority that Taney so boldly proclaimed in Dred Scott lies covertly beneath the contemporary Court’s decisions involving unarmed police killings.Part II of this Article series discusses the sea change in excessive force standards from the common law’s reasonableness standard to the current “rationalized fear” or “new dread” standard. Part II chronicles the change from different social, institutional, and legal perspectives, which have been factors influencing the sea change. These factors include: (1) the erosion of the common law right to resist an unlawful arrest; (2) the evolution of the modern police force; (3) the development of the law-and-order Supreme Court after the social tumult in the 1960s and the simultaneous development of radical social conservatism; (4) the Court’s holding in Graham v. Connor which was the first to express the shift legally; (5) the culture of police accountability encouraged by the law-and-order Supreme Court; and (6) the judicial creation and expansion of the qualified immunity doctrine. Part II exposes how the new dread standard operates by providing evidence that distills the current, amorphous excessive force rule into an articulable legal standard reflecting its true effect and intent.

Civil Rights in America: A History by Christopher W. Schmidt

Reviewed by: Civil Rights in America: A History by Christopher W. Schmidt Adam Lee Cilli Civil Rights in America: A History. By Christopher W. Schmidt. Cambridge Studies on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 215. Paper, $34.99, ISBN 978-1-108-44497-2; cloth, $99.99, ISBN 978-1-108-42625-1.) Christopher W. Schmidt's Civil Rights in America: A History manages at once to be analytically rigorous and highly accessible. Without getting bogged down in technical legal jargon, he tells a big story about a two-word phrase, civil rights, that has been at the center of some of the most transformative episodes in American political history since 1865. Schmidt shows how policy makers and activists from the Reconstruction era to the present have built on preexisting meanings associated with civil rights while fighting to expand its scope. "The power of the civil rights label is that it has been a relatively open concept," the author writes, "with a meaning that evolves as different groups convince their fellow Americans that their rights claims also belong under its protective umbrella" (p. 136). In the aftermath of the Civil War, as the legal status of four million former slaves remained unclear, the definition of civil rights became the central focus of a national debate over what constituted citizenship. Black leaders and their white allies fought for a more expansive vision of civil rights, one that went beyond property rights and access to courts to include federal safeguards against race-based discrimination. Schmidt adroitly probes congressional records, letters and petitions from freedpeople, newspaper editorials, and speech transcripts to reconstruct the debates that took place in and outside halls of governance and to track the expansion of civil rights from the 1866 Civil Rights Act to transformative constitutional amendments. [End Page 424] Debates over the nature of civil rights gradually subsided after Reconstruction, and during the ensuing Jim Crow era, civil rights were rarely featured as an object of national public discourse. Beginning in the late 1940s, however, the term once again assumed countrywide significance. For reasons of "principle, politics, and international strategy," Cold War liberals focused renewed federal attention on racial injustice in America and harnessed the civil rights label to describe and advance "the most ambitious collection of antidiscrimination reforms" since Reconstruction (p. 54). Sensing this shift in the political wind, Black and white activists invoked civil rights to espouse a far-reaching set of social goals, and they leveraged its "universalist frame" to build a broad-based interracial coalition (p. 54). This era thus witnessed the emergence of new descriptors such as civil rights lawyers, civil rights organizations, and a civil rights movement, and it culminated with the passages of the civil rights and voting rights laws of 1964 and 1965. Opposition to civil rights, as a set of fundamental rights and as a label, is a part of this story as well. Often this came from conservatives desiring to restrict its meaning or roll back its gains. Yet sometimes it included left-wing activists committed to building a more just and racially egalitarian society. Indeed, some of the very proponents of civil rights reform also expressed discomfort with its limits, with the host of issues it excluded. Thus, for Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, and in his later years, Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights became "a convenient foil" against which they could espouse more radical programs (p. 77). This points to a central element of Schmidt's analysis. He argues that one of the strengths of civil rights as a term of political discourse is its limiting feature—that it has always involved a historically contingent process of negotiation and compromise over what is a civil right and what is not. Through these debates, "a functional consensus [has often] emerged around the core meaning" of civil rights that has "provided a foundation for claims of radical change in American racial politics while at the same time serving as a constraint on this change" (pp. 12, 13). Without such boundaries, the phrase loses much of its political and discursive power. It slips into ambiguity—alongside social justice, equality, and freedom—and...

Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore

Reviewed by: Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump ed. by Andrew S. Moore Finbarr Curtis Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. Edited by Andrew S. Moore. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 197. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7434-0.) The proclamation of 1976 as the "Year of the Evangelical" in the United States served as the capstone of a conventional narrative in which theologically conservative Protestants disappeared from American politics in the [End Page 425] mid-twentieth century only to reemerge in the 1970s with the uncomfortable pairing of the presidency of Jimmy Carter and the rise of the religious Right. Evangelicals and Presidential Politics: From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump brings together ten insightful essays on a range of themes that consider what happened in the four decades between President Carter and President Donald J. Trump. The book uses the year of the evangelical as an organizing theme, but several contributors challenge the conventional narrative. The first essay, by Randall J. Stephens, discusses how opposition to communism drew evangelicals into politics long before the 1970s. This activism did have some features of disengagement as it was a kind of anti-politics that saw "godless communism" as a pervasive feature of an expanding liberal welfare state that needed to be curtailed to protect Christian liberty (p. 17). In several chapters that explore the intersection of racial and religious identities, suspicions of an expansion of government overlapped with suspicions of the expansion of civil rights. Dan Wells's perceptive essay on Eldridge Cleaver demonstrates the whiteness of evangelicalism, as the former Black Panther was expected to speak in a white idiom that disavowed his radical past. Opposition to civil rights is central to Randall Balmer's chapter on the changing makeup of anti-abortion activism over the course of the 1970s. In Balmer's analysis, abortion, a largely Catholic issue at the time of Roe v. Wade (1973), became a rallying point for conservative Protestants who were upset at desegregated schools but needed a more respectable means to mobilize support for racialized family values. There is some divergence among the essays about how early evangelical opposition to abortion took shape. Balmer focuses on the coalition-building project of political activists. Essays by Allison Vander Broek and Daniel K. Williams suggest that while Catholics were the most visible and organized in their opposition to abortion, there was a latent theological appeal that fit with conservative Protestant attitudes toward sexuality. The book does not promise complete coverage of the years from Carter to Trump, but one notable feature is that Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Trump capture the most attention. Jeff Frederick sees the rise of Trumpism as the loss of what he calls Carter's "evangelical political authenticity" (p. 140). J. Brooks Flippen's essay on Reagan considers the irony of how a divorced actor with sporadic church attendance became the exemplar of the Christian Right. R. Ward Holder shares Frederick's view that enthusiasm for Trump represents a betrayal of evangelical principles. These chapters tell a declension story that moves from a sincere Carter, to a pragmatic compromise with Reagan, to a full-blown abandonment of moral character with Trump. There is some confusion that extends beyond this book over whether the use of the label evangelical describes a group of people or whether it is a rhetorical project to invent a group of people. In the former, evangelical describes a theological orientation that includes diverse racial, political, and religious groups as well as a set of principles used to applaud the sincerity of Carter and lament the immorality of Trump. In the latter, this rhetorical project has political, national, and racial dimensions that are internal to the claim of working within a conservative Protestant tradition. Hannah Dick most clearly articulates the latter position with her assertion that white evangelicalism is simultaneously [End Page 426] "a cultural framework, a religious affiliation, a class-based category, and a political orientation" (p. 174). One question the book raises is whether someone like Carter represents authentic evangelicalism or whether he is an idiosyncratic figure who represents the theological ideals of evangelical academics...

Democracy and the Preparation and Conduct of War

AbstractIn Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, Ned Dobos highlights several negative consequences the preparation for war has for individuals and states. But he misses what I consider perhaps the most significant consequence of military mobilization for states, especially democracies: how war and the preparation for it affect deliberative politics. While many argue that all states, including democracies, require strong militaries—and there is some evidence that long wars can build democracies and states—I focus on the other effects of militarization and war on democratic states. War and militarism are antipodal to democracy and undermine it. Their normative bases are conflicting—democracy takes force off the table, whereas force is legitimate in war. Thus, while militarism and militarization can sometimes yield liberalization and the expansion of civil rights, they are arguably more likely to undermine democratic norms and practices.

Anticipating the 50th Year of Family Process: New Initiatives

Anticipating the 50th Year of <i>Family Process</i>: New Initiatives

Changes in law and society during the Civil War and Reconstruction: a legal history documentary reader

This title presents significant legal history documents from a transformative era. The first comprehensive collection of legal history documents from the Civil War and Reconstruction, this volume shows the profound legal changes that occurred during the Civil War era and highlights how law, society, and politics inextricably mixed and set American legal development on particular paths that were not predetermined. Editor Christian G. Samito carefully selected excerpts from legislation, public and legislative debates, and rare court-martial records, adds his expert analysis to clearly present the key facts, and illustrates the selections with telling period artwork to create an outstanding resource that demonstrates the rich and important legal history of the era. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the United States experienced long-lasting and significant constitutional and societal reform. This critical period forced the government and the American people to confront the contours of presidential power and consider the boundaries of civil liberties during wartime. Samito shows how legislation fueled national development, furthered the centralization and expansion of the federal government, revolutionized and nationalized the banking system, and promoted the coercive power of the government as well as its role in taking care of its citizens. The law of slavery gave way to the hard-fought struggle for black equality while Americans struggled over how to implement the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. The materials in this volume demonstrate that legal development is not a story of linear progression. They illuminate themes of fluidity, contingency, and participation, and bring forth the theoretical and personal aspects of the law. Samito focuses on such topics as blacks in the North and South before the Civil War, the expansion of governmental power and the nationalization of the Union, blacks and the U.S. military, President Lincoln's constitutionalism, the expansion of civil rights and opposition to them, and judicial interpretation of the Civil War Amendments and civil rights legislation. The Civil War Amendments and other legislation afforded African Americans national citizenship and began to define some of the rights and practices associated with that status, but, as Samito makes evident, the potential of this reformative moment eroded in the face of Southern white resistance as well as the judicial limitation of the amendments themselves. Nonetheless, the theoretical arguments and practical changes during this era set valuable precedents and influenced future arguments over these same issues. Through this exciting collection, readers will come to understand how the issues of the 1860s are, in many cases, the same issues Americans debate today.

Disability Civil Rights and a New Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century: The Expansion of Civil Rights Beyond Race, Gender and Age

The modern workplace is becoming diverse in ways that are no longer captured by exclusive categories of race, gender, and age. Class and economic differences, sexual orientation, multiple careers, and individuals with disabilities are all a part of a workforce that is changing the American employment landscape in non-traditional ways. For many people in the workforce, being treated equally does not always achieve a workplace free of discrimination, nor accomplish the broad goals of civil rights. The lack of homogeneity among people with disabilities requires an individual and contextual analysis under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as well as a flexible, interactive process between the employer and the employee to provide a reasonable accommodation. Miller argues that this disability rights paradigm - one that necessitates an individualized, case-by-case analysis of discrimination - better reflects the diversity and needs of the complex, modern workforce.

Normative liberal theory and the bifurcation of human rights

This article argues that liberal arguments for human rights minimalism, such as those of John Rawls and Michael Ignatieff, contain fundamental inconsistencies in their treatment of core rights to life and liberty. Insofar as their versions of minimalism foreground rights to physical security and basic freedom of movement, they cannot coherently exclude certain social and economic protections and liberties that directly support or are even partly constitutive of these rights. Nor do they have good grounds for putting the social and private realms wholly beyond the purview of international law. ‘New’ human rights that represent an expansion of civil rights in particular beyond the classic conception to encompass, for example, the right to freedom from sexual and gender-based violence, illustrate especially well the extent to which civil, social, and economic rights violations, and their remedies, are deeply interwoven. These emergent rights also directly challenge the dichotomy between the public/political and private/social realms, and the corollary assumption that human rights violations occur mainly or exclusively in the former sphere. While the concerns that motivate arguments for human rights minimalism—considerations of pluralism and prudence—are legitimate, proponents would do best to reconsider the multiple roles that human rights in fact play, in spite of their essentially contested status.

Black Female Executions in Historical Context

This article examines the systemic oppression of executed Black women from the earliest periods of American history. The most consistent factor in Black female executions throughout U.S. history is criminal justice authorities' executions of Black women largely for challenging gendered and racist exploitation. Colonial and antebellum slavery institutionalized the persecution of slave women, who often retaliated against oppressive brutality by killing White masters. White lynch mobs effectively augmented the legal killing of Black women in postbellum society and lowered Black female execution rates. Reduced to a peonage state in the apartheid of Jim Crow, Black women's crimes of resistance against White brutality paralleled those of slave women decades earlier. And despite the delusional expansion of civil rights and the sovereignty of Black people over the confines of segregation in the modern era, the racialized sexism of American criminal justice has rendered Black women ever more vulnerable to the death penalty.

American Liberalism and the Warren Court's Legacy

As the twentieth century ended, the Supreme Court's place within American liberalism became increasingly conflicted. The triumph of Ronald Reagan's Republican conservatism and the sudden cessation of the Cold War eroded the heritage of the New Deal and Great Society. The Supreme Court symbolized the rise, consummation, and decline of this liberal tradition. Franklin D. Roosevelt's success after 1937 in placing upon the Court supporters of his vision represented the New Deal's ascendency; the appointment to the Court during the 1980s and early 1990s of Reagan Republicans signaled that a new conservatism had taken hold. At the historical center of this gradual transformation was the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, known to history as the Warren Court. From 1953 to 1969, it brought about the most significant expansion of civil rights and liberties the nation had ever known. Since the late 1960s, the rights revolution became synonymous with a larger, more activist liberal government, feeding growing public dissatisfaction which Reagan conservatism tapped to gain victory. Overcoming the Warren Court's legacy proved to be, however, more difficult than the conservatives had hoped; the new books by Mark V. Tushnet and Morton J. Horwitz reveal much about the origins and character of an ongoing struggle. Horwitz's small book summarizes well what has become the standard