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.

The first ladies of the United States are often not thought about as activists. But in fact, many used their political position strategically to advocate for important reforms that benefited minorities and other underrepresented groups. Their activism from the White House helped social and political causes in different eras. Their unsung work contributed to their administration’s public profile and legacy. It also aided larger social justice campaigns going on throughout US history. This chapter explores the frequently unsung efforts of US first ladies in the realm of social advocacy to shed greater light on the significant work done by these women. It challenges the notion that first ladies were simply ornaments or companions for their husbands and highlights the actions that they took to create change.

Martha Washington set countless precedents as first lady—including the use of enslaved labor in the Washingtons’ presidential household. One-third of America’s first ladies were born or married into slave–owning families, making it an important but often overlooked part of their identities and actions in the White House and beyond. The relationship between first ladies and race goes far beyond the subject of slavery. Throughout history, these women have used their platform to bring attention to issues affecting Americans, champion causes, and encourage the president to act. As unelected participants in an administration, first ladies have sometimes been able to pursue civil rights with more freedom and flexibility than their spouses, speaking out against lynching, segregation, and other concerns facing the Black community. This chapter will explore the complex role of first ladies in the fight for equal rights using case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

By 1948, the trials had far exceeded estimates for their original time frame. This chapter looks at the effects the growing distance from the occupation had on court practice and the broader administration of the trials. It highlights how the unexpectedly long duration of the trials confronted the Ministry of Justice and the Director of Public Prosecutions with two specific challenges: firstly, it emerged that verdicts had been handed down unevenly over time; secondly, broader attitudes towards the trials in civil society had by now changed perceptibly. At the same time, the authorities in charge of the trials had a number of reservations against changing their legal parameters, as they were concerned for their long-term legacy should they be softened. This fundamental tension, along with the decision not to prosecute a number of wartime crimes such as economic collaboration, defined the later stages of the trials.

This chapter explores how contemporary novelist Kamila Shamsie adapts dramatic forms to stage ideological and ethical conflicts in her works, focusing on her acclaimed 2017 novel Home Fire in particular. Through a discussion of Home Fire’s thematic and formal reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone in the context of contemporary debates about citizenship and civil rights in the UK, the chapter investigates the ways in which Shamsie’s novelistic dramatisation of ideas engenders a critique of the politics of belonging in the post-9/11 age. In particular, the chapter focuses on the staging of competing ethical and political demands via interpersonal conflict, the use of multi-perspectival narration to critically refract contemporary concerns about citizenship and civil rights, and the representation of forms of mediation and public discourse in Shamsie’s novel.

This chapter argues that the 1848 Revolutions can profitably be understood through the prism of arguments over rights. It highlights a series of contests between those who championed a “thin” conception of individual civil and political rights and those who defended a variety of “thicker” understandings: whether of rights as belonging to collectives, especially national minorities; as protecting cultural, linguistic, or gender identities and differences; or as demands for extensive state action to challenge economic domination of workers by landowners and capitalists. The offer of individual rights under a “thinner” constitutional order in the Habsburg monarchy was insufficient to address conflicts between the dominant Magyar nation and the claims of the regime’s other national groups; at the same time, these conflicts generated nuanced efforts to theorize individual and collective rights by figures such as József Eötvös. Ostensibly “thin” demands for individual equality under the law proved unable to protect individuals – particularly emancipated slaves, peasants, laborers, and women – from domination deep-seated in existing social structures.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child created a legal subject without the possibility for children to exercise any agency in the making of their own identity. What differs between the child-rights identity based on age and a socially constructed identity, and self-identification is that age is a random event free from choice, detached from family context, delinked from any social context and disconnected from one’s self-image.

This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.

The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.