• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Journals
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Journals
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    Rights Revolutions and Counter- Revolutions

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    22_13YaleJL_Human531_2001_.pdf
    Size:
    1.525Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Shugerman, Jed
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/7317
    Abstract
    Richard A. Primus, The American Language of Rights. New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. $54.95. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. $29.95. The rise of rights talk is a subject that has gripped academia in recent years. Many historians of modem America are now searching for the origins of the rights revolution and the feverish use of rights arguments on the left and on the right. Two recent works of legal history tackle one part of this question with trailblazing interpretations, focusing on left-wing rights discourse and the successes of the civil rights movement. Both books offer compelling and well-written narratives of post-war legal issues, and they present innovative arguments that this revolution began in response to global crises. Richard Primus's The American Language of Rights argues that rights are not natural truths, but are, rather, historically contingent. Rights, he claims, evolve when a political community reacts to particular adversities and synthesizes established rights with new conceptions of rights to combat that adversity. Just as the Founding and Reconstruction generations articulated systems of rights in response to particular events and evils, the post-World War II generation pursued a vision of human rights defined against the horrors of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism. In a parallel story, Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights attributes America's advances in desegregation to a global public relations crisis over the treatment of blacks. As this international embarrassment provided ample fodder for Communist propaganda, presidents from Truman to Johnson heeded a "Cold War imperative" to promote racial justice. Grappling with the complicated origins of the civil rights movement and the Warren Court's activism, Primus and Dudziak offer coherent explanations that integrate domestic politics, international events, and the world of ideas. By placing this rights revolution so clearly in their global post-war context, they have pushed the boundaries of the legal academy to a more global perspective, and they have contributed to our understanding of the civil rights movement's broader origins. They have also suggested how seemingly unrelated events force leaders to embrace social reform, and how those leaders build on rights traditions to gain momentum. Even as legal academics continue to argue that rights are fundamental and universal, Primus and Dudziak offer evidence that rights are historically constructed, contextually reactive, and ad hoc. However, both books emphasize the role of elites, and for that matter, of left-leaning elites, which leads to two shared shortcomings. This emphasis enables them to make some particularly insightful observations about the decisions of many significant political leaders, judges, and academics from the 1940s to the 1960s. This perspective creates a great story, but unfortunately, it is only half the story, or more accurately, one quarter of the story. As a result, they overlook some very significant differing perspectives on the Cold War and rights discourse.
    Collections
    Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2025)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.