The focus of these entries is on the relationship between the subject and civil liberties. In addition to the basic discussion of the subject, each entry may include the following issues: history, origins, and development; legal, academic, or theoretical debates; perspectives from different fields or schools of thought; or any unresolved issues concerning the subject.
As government has grown in the United States, conflicts between religious observers and the law have increased proportionately. Modern dilemmas are easy to find. Members of the Native American church seek to use peyote despite laws prohibiting its possession.
Emerging by the early nineteenth century, the bad tendency test remained the predominant judicial approach to determining the scope of free expression for over a century.
In 1791, the Eighth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights for the purpose of prohibiting, among other things, the requirement of ‘‘excessive bail.’’
‘‘Balancing’’ refers to a method of adjudication used by judges to reach decisions through weighing the parties’ competing interests or rights.
In constitutional adjudication, the balancing test is the predominant mode of case resolution, although major differences exist on ‘‘how to strike the balance.’’ The balance that must be struck is between individual freedoms and societal needs such as the need to preserve order.
The Baldus Study, conducted by Professors David Baldus, George Woodworth, and Charles Pulaski, was a sophisticated empirical analysis of 2,484 Georgia homicide cases that were charged and sentenced in the 1970s.
Method by which the people of various states exercise their retained right to initiate and adopt legislation directly.
From the time in the early 1600s that some of the early Puritans came to believe that infant baptism could not be justified on biblical grounds, to the final abolition of the last remaining compulsory religious taxation system in Massachusetts in 1833, the Baptists bore the brunt of the religious persecution and discrimination meted out in early American communities.
To speak with precision of the Bible’s influence on American civil liberties is impossible because of its pervasive general presence in American culture during important formative periods of its history and jurisprudence.
A bill of attainder imposes punishment on specific individuals or members of a group through an act taken by the legislature rather than a judicial trial.
Birth control is the generic term to describe methods used to limit the number of children. These methods fall into two main categories: those that try to prevent conception, and those that terminate an embryo or fetus.
Blacklisting is similar to blackballing. As the latter is associated with the placement of a black marble among the white ones in a bag, signifying that the applicant to a club has been denied membership by a single member, a blacklist is a powerful tool wielded by employers that denies the possibility of work to anyone whose name has been placed on a specific list.
Roger Williams began his religious career as a Puritan minister, and when he arrived in Massachusetts in 1630 he was initially well received.
The blue wall of silence is an unwritten code that prohibits police officers from providing adverse information against fellow officers. In essence, the code states that ‘‘cops don’t tell on cops.’’
Troops had been stationed in Boston and other cities in the colonies as a result of growing resistance by the colonists against imperial laws, especially the hated Townshend Acts.