Explore the cases, people, and ideas that have shaped civil liberties in the United States.
A civil proceeding initiated by the Massachusetts attorney general declared Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (more commonly known as Fanny Hill) to be obscene. The publisher, G. P. Putman, appealed and lost.
One of the two decisions known as the school prayer cases, Abington followed immediately in the wake of Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), in which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the recitation in public schools of a prayer composed by the New York Board of Regents.
A new and aggressive phase of American abolitionism emerged in the 1830s. Called ‘‘immediatism,’’ the movement for the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of slaves without expatriation (which received institutional expression first from the regional New England Anti-Slavery Society
Abolitionists were individuals committed to eradicating chattel slavery in the United States. The first organized abolitionist group was the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS).
In Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that assessment of mandatory service charges on nonunion members in an agency shop to finance union expenditures for collective bargaining did not violate their First Amendment rights.
Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, abortion was an issue to which men, and therefore lawmakers, judges, and politicians, paid little or no attention.
A defining principle of the United States is the separation between church and state.
In three cases, the Supreme Court has considered the rights of anti-abortion protestors outside abortion clinics.
Condemning ‘‘the hypocrisy of the United States and her allies’’ and denouncing President Woodrow Wilson as a hypocrite and a coward, Jacob Abrams and four associates—all five Russian-born Jews and avowed anarchists—distributed fliers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the summer of 1918 directing attention to U.S. efforts to halt the Bolshevik Revolution.
Absolutism is an approach to interpretation of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech that takes literally the text of the amendment when it declares that ‘‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.’’
Abu Ghraib prison was originally built in the 1960s by Western contractors but achieved notoriety during Saddam Hussein’s rule as a repository for up to fifteen thousand of his political enemies.
Academic freedom is a concept that encompasses notions of philosophy and contracts as well as civil liberties. In the United States the concept of academic freedom has developed primarily (although not exclusively) in the context of higher education.
In a democratic society, the informed citizen must have an affirmative right to gain access to information concerning the operations of government.
Courts generally recognize two independent rights of public access to judicial records, one stemming from the common law and one from the First Amendment. Both are predicated on furthering government accountability.
In two cases decided on the same day in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court said that state and federal prison regulations barring journalists from interviewing individual inmates did not violate the First Amendment.