With this volume, Roe v. Dobbs: The Past, Present and Future of a Constitutional Right of Abortion, we confront the remarkable beginning and end-once again, after a half-century-of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, shockingly overruled by the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The goal of this book is to bring together some of our nation's experts to share their views on whether there should be a constitutional right to abortion and what the consequences of Dobbs might be.
What makes this subject unique is how it intersects with our own lives, since both Bollinger and Stone were law clerks at the Supreme Court in the year that Roe was decided (1973). During the Court's 1972 Term, when Roe was decided, the Court was in a state of flux. President Nixon had just appointed four Justices to the Court. The era of the Warren Court was clearly over. In those days, the Justices were nonpartisan, often joined opinions across the political/ideological spectrum, and approached cases with an open mind. That in large part explains why the Court could reach the decision it did in Roe, with five of the six Republican-appointed Justices and two of the three Democratic-appointed Justices in the majority, and one Republican-appointed justice and one Democratic-appointed justice in dissent. It was a different Court and a different era.
A timely defense of affirmative action policies that offers a more nuanced understanding of how centuries of invidious racism, discrimination, and segregation in the United States led to and justifies such policies from both a moral and constitutional perspective.
In A Legacy of Discrimination, leading constitutional scholars Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone trace affirmative action's history and the legal challenges it has faced over the decades. They argue that in order to fully comprehend affirmative action's original intent and impact, we must reacquaint ourselves with the era in which it arose, beginning with the most important Supreme Court decision of the twentieth century, 1954's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Assessing this history, Bollinger and Stone introduce subsequent, and evolving, affirmative-action case law that had the intent and effect of constraining social, educational, and economic progress for Black people and other minority groups. They demonstrate how and why affirmative action policies stand on firm legal ground and must remain protected. Further, they explain why Americans must view affirmative action as a long-term moral commitment to secure justice, especially for Black Americans, after three and a half centuries of grave injustice that violates the most essential aspirations of our nation.
A broad explanation of the various dimensions of the problem of 'bad' speech on the internet within the American context.
One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about 'bad' speech-hate speech, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and incitement of violence-on the internet, and in particular speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors-including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Newt Minow, Tim Wu, Cass Sunstein, Jack Balkin, Emily Bazelon, and others-to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context. They stress how difficult it is to develop remedies given that some of these forms of 'bad' speech are ordinarily protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger and Stone argue that it is important to remember that the last time we encountered major new communications technology-television and radio-we established a federal agency to provide oversight and to issue regulations to protect and promote 'the public interest.' Featuring a variety of perspectives from some of America's leading experts on this hotly contested issue, this volume offers new insights for the future of free speech in the social media era.
The Supreme Court's 1919 decision in Schenck vs. the United States is one of the most important free speech cases in American history. Written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, it is most famous for first invoking the phrase 'clear and present danger.' Although the decision upheld the conviction of an individual for criticizing the draft during World War I, it also laid the foundation for our nation's robust protection of free speech. Over time, the standard Holmes devised made freedom of speech in America a reality rather than merely an ideal.
In The Free Speech Century, two of America's leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars to evaluate the evolution of free speech doctrine since Schenk and to assess where it might be headed in the future.
Publishing on the one hundredth anniversary of the decision that laid the foundation for America's free speech tradition, The Free Speech Century will serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in how our understanding of the First Amendment transformed over time and why it is so critical both for the United States and for the world today.
