Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Police Harassment ◽  
The Right ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This epilogue shows that Hague v. CIO had a legacy more complex than its reputation as a speech rights victory for workers and others over dictatorial city boss Frank Hague under the Bill of Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) immediately split over the decision’s ramifications. Moreover, while the ruling enlarged constitutional protection for the right of public assembly to the benefit of Jehovah’s Witnesses, civil rights demonstrators, and others, it did little to enhance picketing and other “labor speech,” or to shield union organizers from police harassment. And while the decision freed the CIO to organize in Jersey City, it did not destroy Mayor Hague, who accommodated CIO unions and was ousted later due to city politics.

From Property Rights to Liberty Rights: We the Corporations, A Review Essay

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-340
Author(s):  
Laura Phillips Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
State Action ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right ◽  
We The People

A long-standing, and deeply controversial, question in constitutional law is whether or not the Constitution's protections for “persons” and “people” extend to corporations. Law professor Adam Winkler's We the Corporations chronicles the most important legal battles launched by corporations to “win their constitutional rights,” by which he means both civil rights against discriminatory state action and civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (p. xvii). Today, we think of the former as the right to be free from unequal treatment, often protected by statutory laws, and the latter as liberties that affect the ability to live one's life fully, such as the freedom of religion, speech, or association. The vim in Winkler's argument is that the court blurred this distinction when it applied liberty rights to nonprofit corporations and then, through a series of twentieth-century rulings, corporations were able to advance greater claims to liberty rights. Ultimately, those liberty rights have been employed to strike down significant bipartisan regulations, such as campaign finance laws, which were intended to advance democratic participation in the political process. At its core, this book asks, to what extent do “we the people” rule corporations and to what extent do they rule us?

scholarly journals The Scientific Gaze in American Transgender Politics: Contesting the Meanings of Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity in the Bathroom Rights Cases

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Wuest
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Transgender Identity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Right ◽  
Gloucester County ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

AbstractIn this article, I examine how conflicts over transgender bathroom rights have ignited debates concerning the fundamental nature of transgender identity. Through an institutional and discursive analysis of North Carolina's House Bill 2 or “bathroom bill,” the Title IX case inGloucester County School Board v. G. G.,and similar federal court cases, I explore how and why forces both on the right and in the LGBTQ movement have come to rely on scientific expertise to legitimate their conceptions. As conservatives have marshaled evidence to challenge notions that transgender identity is innate, LGBTQ and transgender organizations as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have crafted a “born this way” biopolitical construction of transgender identity. I find that at their core, these conflicts are over the meanings of gender and sex in relation to transgender identity. Conservatives posit sex as biologically rooted and gender as a psychological phenomenon, whereas transgender advocates subsume gender identity into the definition of sex in arguing that constitutional and federal civil rights law must recognize gender identity as a biologically constitutive element of sex. I conclude by noting the limits of a liberal assimilationist and litigation-centric transgender politics and by exploring alternatives to this biopolitical form of transgender political identity.

scholarly journals Book Review: Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties: Revised and Expanded Edition, 2nd ed.

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Seth Kershner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The United States ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Right

Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter. The #MeToo movement. Over the past decade, the United States has seen a surge in activism around civil rights, broadly defined as the right to be free from discrimination and unequal treatment in arenas such as housing, the workplace, and the criminal justice system. At times, as when activists are arrested at a protest, calls for civil rights can also be the occasion for violations of civil liberties—certain basic freedoms (e.g., freedom of speech) that are either enshrined in the Constitution or established through legal rulings. While civil rights are distinct from civil liberties, students often struggle to articulate these differences and appreciate the links between the two concepts. Complicating this distinction is the fact that historically reference materials have tended to cover either one or the other but not the two in combination. Combining these two concepts in one work is what makes a revised edition of the Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties so timely and valuable.

Into Federal District Court

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-143
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
District Court ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Federal District Court ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
New Vision ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This chapter recounts the federal district court injunction proceeding instituted by the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to stop Jersey City from denying leafletting rights and public-speaking permits. Revealing the hearing’s nastiness, the chapter shows that the trial had legal significance beyond exposing Mayor Hague’s misdeeds, as it tested whether Jersey City’s claim of traditional municipal police powers against alleged CIO communists or the ACLU’s new vision of nationally protected speech and assembly rights for workers would prevail, and indeed, whether federal courts would accept jurisdiction. With law in flux, the chapter concludes, the district court broke new ground by assuming jurisdiction, rejecting Jersey City’s old legal vision, embracing new ACLU views, and enjoining Jersey City as requested.

Tibetans Wait for China's Next Move

Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 36-39
Author(s):  
Kesang Tseten
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Right ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
The U.S ◽  
International League

AbstractIt has been twenty years since the Tibetan uprising. Last March, Tibetans and their American supporters rallied outside the United Nations building to commemorate that uprising against Chinese troops occupying the Tibetan homeland.Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and honorary president of the International League for Human Rights, was there calling for support of resolutions passed three times by the U.S. General Assembly, in 1959, 1961, and 1965. The U.S. called “for respect for the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people and for their right to self-determination.” The rally, Baldwin said, was to protest the “subjection of six million people to foreign rule” and to uphold “the right to live in your own house.” The nonagenarian champion of civil liberties expressed some hope: “It may be that autonomy, semi-independence in Tibet, may be granted when China settles down into the modernization it seeks.”

scholarly journals Reconciling civil liberties and public health in the response to COVID-19

FACETS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 887-898
Author(s):  
Colleen M. Flood ◽  
Vanessa MacDonnell ◽  
Bryan Thomas ◽  
Kumanan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Burden Of Proof ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Precautionary Principle ◽  
Response Strategies ◽  
The Right ◽  
Health Discourse

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges governments face in balancing civil liberties against the exigencies of public health amid the chaos of a public health emergency. Current and emerging pandemic response strategies may engage diverse rights grounded in civil liberties, including mobility rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and the right to liberty and security of the person. As traditionally conceived, the discourses of civil rights and public health rest on opposite assumptions about the burden of proof. In the discourse of civil and political rights of the sort guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the onus rests on government to show that any limitation on rights is justified. By contrast, public health discourse centers on the precautionary principle, which holds that intrusive measures may be taken—lockdowns, for example—even in the absence of complete evidence of the benefits of the intervention or of the nature of the risk. In this article, we argue that the two principles are not so oppositional in practice. In testing for proportionality, courts recognize the need to defer to governments on complex policy matters, especially where the interests of vulnerable populations are at stake. For their part, public health experts have incorporated ideas of proportionality in their evolving understanding of the precautionary principle. Synthesizing these perspectives, we emphasize the importance of policy agility in the COVID-19 response, ensuring that measures taken are continually supported by the best evidence and continually recalibrated to avoid unnecessary interference with civil liberties.

Workers against the City

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
District Court ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Municipal Law ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This book contributes to legal and labor history by reinterpreting the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hague v. CIO (1939) decision, which upheld a federal district court injunction prohibiting Jersey City boss Frank Hague from obstructing workers from the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allies in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from meeting in urban public places. The case involved speech and assembly freedoms, rights essential for CIO workers’ organizing efforts, but, as the book shows, these rights were submerged under municipal police powers to preserve public order until the court brought them under federal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment in Hague. Revising the conventional view, the book argues that Hague was more than simply a civil liberties victory for workers over a dictatorial, antilabor city boss. Drawing on new evidence in city archives, CIO records, trial transcripts, newspaper reports, and Jersey City court filings, as well as traditional sources in ACLU records and anti-Hague literature, the book demonstrates that the Hague-versus-CIO controversy emanated more from shifts in the labor movement from craft to industrial unionism, in municipal law, in urban police practices, in the politics of anticommunism and antifascism, and especially in the Supreme Court’s “civil liberties revolution.” With women and African Americans on the periphery, the book concludes, male CIO workers initiated the case, but Hague ultimately benefitted outdoor protests more than it benefitted labor speech.

Community Organizing under the AFL-CIO Umbrella

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Executive Board ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
District 65

This chapter demonstrates how, after five years of heading up a few of the left-led Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) refugees, the DPO and District 65 were attacked and on the verge of collapse. It had proved almost impossible to continue to organize without the security provided by the CIO, and the union's Executive Board finally decided to accept the CIO's terms for reinstatement. The chapter follows District 65 as it attempted to rebuild and, essentially, prove its worth to the rest of the labor movement and to civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The chapter explores the consequences of the reaffiliation for the union's “militant” fight for economic equality and offers an analysis of how District 65's organizing strategies were affected by reaffiliation with the CIO.

Crystal Eastman

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Family Balance ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union

Crystal Eastman was a central figure in many of the defining social movements of the twentieth century—labor, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace. She drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Eastman worked side by side with national and international suffrage leaders, renowned Progressive reformers and legislators, birth control advocates, civil rights champions, and revolutionary writers and artists. She traveled with a transatlantic crowd of boundary breakers and innovators. And in virtually every arena she entered, she was one of the most memorable women known to her allies and adversaries alike. Yet today, her legacy is oddly ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. This first full-length biography recovers the revealing story of a woman who attained rare political influence and left a thought-provoking legacy in ongoing struggles. The social justice issues she cared about—gender equality and human rights, nationalism and globalization, political censorship and media control, worker benefits and family balance, and the monumental questions of war, sovereignty, force, and freedom—remain some of the most consequential questions of our own time.

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