Civil Liberties and the Bill of Rights

The civil liberties and constitutional rights possessed by our nation’s residents – not solely in concept, however within the courtroom, the place the state could be pressured to honor these liberties – are a uniquely American invention. And after we had been taught historical past and realized concerning the Structure and its Invoice of Rights, we had been all the time made conscious of that uniqueness, of the extraordinary experiment that gave to each citizen of this new nation a present possessed by no others. Now you may study precisely what that present was – in a collection of 36 lectures primarily based on Supreme Courtroom opinions from dozens of the Courtroom’s most vital landmark selections, introduced by an award-winning instructor who can be an internationally acknowledged skilled in constitutional legislation. You may study simply what liberties and rights the Founders wished the brand new authorities to guard, in addition to how we get from what Professor Finn calls the Structure’s “splendidly elastic and imprecise” language to the finely tuned specifics of the Supreme Courtroom’s opinions about speech, abortion, and faith, and a lot extra. And you may grasp the arduous fact that regardless of how unwavering the Structure’s language on any topic could seem, issues are nearly invariably extra difficult than it could appear at first studying. The result’s a legacy of questions that multiplies with every passing decade, and explains why generations of jurists and authorized students, to not point out legislators, presidents, and residents, have argued so lengthy and arduous concerning the that means of what typically seems to be unambiguous phrasing.