This introduction examines Cold War liberalism as a significant ideological and political force in U.S. history. It argues that Cold War liberalism was characterized by two core features: a deep skepticism of mass democracy and a commitment to American global hegemony. These traits emerged as the result of Cold War liberals’ encounter with perceived existential threats, particularly Soviet communism, which led them to embrace a politics of emergency that sacrificed liberalism for a broadly defined security. While Cold War liberals achieved some progressive domestic reforms, their actions both at home and abroad often undermined liberal democratic principles. In particular, Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on the necessity of U.S. empire had long-lasting consequences, establishing patterns of domestic governance and foreign military intervention that continue to shape the world today.

American presidents have actively participated in the process that transformed the Declaration of Independence into a fully constitutive document. Many presidential citations are either ceremonial or express shared values. All presidents, however, claim the Declaration supports at least some of their favored policies on civil rights, governmental powers, the culture wars, and immigration. Liberal and conservative presidents dispute whether the Declaration supports regulation in the public interest or limited government. Presidents in the culture wars engage in parallel play, with more progressive presidents citing the Declaration when supporting the rights of LGBTQ persons, gun control, and liberal immigration policies, and conservative presidents citing the Declaration for bans on abortion, a greater place for religion in the public sphere, and crime control measures.

This essay explores the deep and longstanding relationship between African Americans and the Declaration of Independence. From the 1770s to the present, black activists and thinkers have consistently excoriated the paradox of an American democracy that proclaims inalienable rights while systematically denying black citizens’ rights. Drawing on figures such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Frances E. W. Harper, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, and Shirley Chisholm, the text illustrates how African Americans have employed the Declaration as a foundation for their demands for the abolition of slavery, civil rights, and equality. It examines black protest rhetoric’s critique of white supremacy, hypocrisy, and the failure of the United States to live up to its foundational principles. And it emphasizes the crucial role black women have played in advancing black liberation and expanding the scope of equality to include gender and race. Through the centuries, African Americans have called for the United States of America to reconcile its practices with its founding document’s principles of equality and justice for all.

Arguing that the prioritization of a right (or a set of rights) over others was reflective, not only of Cold War tensions between East and West, but also of the power dynamics accompanying decolonization, Barbara Keys’s chapter on the hierarchies of rights sets the stage. The reordering of rights priorities has persisted even beyond the Cold War’s end, as ongoing battles about geopolitical positioning and the distribution of economic resources. Hierarchies constantly change in the evolution of rights.

Yet Michael Cotey Morgan cautions that it was not a seamless alignment. The three ideological agendas orienting the Cold War international politics of human rights were those promoted by state representatives of liberal democracies, communists, and postcolonial nationalists. Alliances between these three approaches to rights were malleable, especially in the non-aligned “Third World.” While socialist and postcolonial states emphasized socioeconomic over individual political and civil rights, many developing states shared the American view that international human rights must not task the state with economic responsibilities toward its citizens. In the Cold War context, the principle on which all states could agree was the protection of state sovereignty, although, beyond the principle of non-interference so problematic to rights protections, no consensus existed on how to measure sovereignty.

Despite the fact that bilingual instruction in the United States of America pre-dates its nationhood, educational policy has undulated its allowance and support for dual language education, marked by both selective preferential treatment of certain (primarily European) languages and through broad opposition to the endeavour as a whole. This brief review of the history and scholarship of dual language education in the USA recaps the ebbs and flows of bilingual education over time and the accompanying shifts in discourses about the purposes and benefits of bilingual education with subsequent implications for how bilingual education is implemented.

In The Secret Life of Copyright, copyright law meets Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in a provocative examination of how our legal regime governing creative production unexpectedly perpetuates inequalities along racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines while undermining progress in the arts. Drawing on numerous case studies – Harvard’s slave daguerreotypes, celebrity sex tapes, famous Wall Street statues, beloved musicals, and dictator copyrights – the book argues that, despite their purported neutrality, key rules governing copyrights – from the authorship, derivative rights, and fair use doctrines to copyright’s First Amendment immunity – systematically disadvantage individuals from traditionally marginalized communities. Since laws regulating the use of creative content increasingly mediate participation and privilege in the digital world, The Secret Life of Copyright provides a template for a more robust copyright system that better addresses egalitarian concerns and serves the interests of creativity.

Following the end of Reconstruction, southern states began adopting legal restrictions to prevent African-Americans from voting. Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws that expressly banned African-Americans from voting, the Court allowed states to use other, ostensibly race-neutral means to disenfranchise African-Americans, such as the poll tax and onerous registration requirements. Following the Second World War, the two national parties struggled with how to address the fact that their southern parties were excluding African-Americans from the nomination process and sending all-white delegations to the national convention. The Democratic Party regularly seated all-white delegations from its southern wing. Only in 1964 did it warn its southern parties that they could no longer exclude African-Americans from party affairs. Meanwhile, in the Republican Party, “lily-white” party organizations gradually took over the southern Republican parties and similarly excluded or marginalized African-Americans in party affairs. As a result, even into the 1960s, African-Americans in the south were regularly excluded from the presidential nomination process in both parties.

Following his studies in philosophy and literature, MacCormick won a Snell Exhibition to study in Balliol College, Oxford (1963–65). He studied law, and this chapter explores both his studies – including the teachers who influenced him, such as Donald Harris and Alan Watson – as well as the influence of Richard Hare, whose work on moral reasoning was important for MacCormick. Alongside this, MacCormick participated in student politics at the time: he became President of the Oxford Union and, as he did in Glasgow, participated in the Union’s debates. Following his studies, in the summer of 1965, thanks to a Balliol Pathfinder Scholarship, MacCormick toured the USA, and recorded his observations, especially with relation to race and civil rights issues. This chapter thus discusses both the legal and the political formation MacCormick received in and thanks to Oxford and considers what impact this had on his character.

This essay first describes how legislation and doctrine create the temptation to build “like race” or “like sex” paradigms for age. It then argues that advocates should resist this temptation for both empirical and strategic reasons. It demonstrates how unmooring the age discrimination paradigm from traditional civil rights models allows us to apprehend it better by considering the distinctive fears older individuals conjure about our own mortality. Finally, it considers how such insights might be incorporated into antidiscrimination law and politics.

The US Constitution committed to equality in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War. Legislators and judges quickly confronted the question of what these new provisions might mean for private actors. The Radical Republicans aimed to bring the commitment to equal protection into private spaces, propagating republican discourses about the practical requirements of equal citizenship and the potential duties of private actors. However, the Supreme Court soon reached its own countervailing conclusion that only state actors, not private actors, gained duties from the Reconstruction Amendments. While this latter understanding remained firm, private actors effectively gained obligations to equality under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later court decisions working around the initial cabining of constitutional equality. Later debates evince a revival of republican-inflected language and arguments for something like horizontal application, even while the country’s jurists viewed such an extension of rights as basically impossible. Several other episodes in constitutional politics, both at the national and state levels, would continue to revisit this question across a range of issue areas.