civil liberties

How Bob Dylan Ran Afoul of the FBI

by Aaron J. Leonard

The combination of alcohol and unconsidered remarks about Lee Harvey Oswald in the wake of the Kennedy assassination helped ensure that the FBI opened a file on the singer. 

Texas GOP's Ten Commandments School Bill Fails

The Texas House did not have the votes to pass a bill approved by the state senate that would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. 

Neil Gorsuch's Understanding of Major Civil Liberties Infringement May Have a Few Gaps

When the Supreme Court Justice called COVID restrictions "the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country" he seems to have revealed his own view that the rights of white men are the ones that count. 

How a Little-Known Anti-Vietnam Protest Reverberates Today

by Gary B. Ostrower

A 1968 disruption of an ROTC ceremony at Alfred University in 1968 involved just 15 students and 2 faculty. It won't be remembered with Berkeley or Columbia in the annals of student protest, but it made a significant impact on the legal requirements placed on universities' policies for dealing with student protest. 

How the Comstock Act is Making a Comeback

Lauren MacIvor Thompson and Mary Ziegler discuss the history of the 19th century Comstock Act and its appeal to abortion opponents as a legal tool to ban abortion nationally. 

Blaming Atlanta "Cop City" Protests on "Outside Agitators" is Familiar and Shameful

by Benjamin Stumpf

Blaming outsiders for grassroots objections to turning valuable parkland over to the police to create an urban warfare training center is an effort to shift blame for violence from police to protesters and to assert that local communities accept the plan. Opponents of civil rights did the same thing. 

Why NYT v. Sullivan Matters More than Ever

Conservative politicians want to use libel laws to intimidate critics. One Supreme Court case stands in their way. 

Cracking Stasi Puzzles is Key to Some Germans Finding the Truth

by Katja Hoyer

With an informant for every 90 citizens, the East German secret police left behind 16,000 sacks of shredded documents. Can information technology help reconstruct a record of what happens when a government commits to spying on its own citizens? 

Law Prof. Joanna Schwartz on How the Police Became Untouchable

Policies that protect individual officers from civil liability, and departments from financial responsibility, have developed into a legal architecture of impunity for American police. 

For "Religious Freedom Day," Take Back the Term's Revolutionary Meaning

The religious right has hijacked the story of Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, obscuring the law's intention to prevent the domination of the religious preferences of the powerful.

Michael Kazin on J. Edgar Hoover, and Beverly Gage's Acclaimed Biography

by Michael Kazin

The signal contribution of Gage's book is not to examine Hoover's ideology or the details of his personal life, but to show how the FBI director built power and broad support, among even liberal Americans, for intrusive surveillance and repression of activists. 

The 1979 Formosa Incident Sparked Taiwan's Democracy Movement

by James Carter

An explainer of the wave of protests that began on December 10, 1979, that disrupted the one-party authoritarian rule of the Kuomintang in Taiwan.

Beverly Gage: When J. Edgar Hoover Tried to Destroy the Left, Liberals Helped Him

by Michael Brenes

Liberals enamored of Hoover's performance professionalism and efficiency, plus his fervent anticommunism, allowed many powerful liberals to remain on board with the repression his FBI unleashed against the political left. 

Beverly Gage on J. Edgar Hoover—Enemy of Democracy

Beverly Gage's book explains the FBI director's longevity not to dark arts of blackmail and secret-keeping, but to a more straightforward and disturbing explanation: many Americans shared Hoover's reactionary views and liked how he cracked down on dissenters. 

Are Americans Ready for their Neighbors to Turn Them In?

From abortion to classroom teaching, state laws are increasingly incentivizing people to report other members of the community for violating new restrictions. Experts say this has worked in the past to erode trust and enable further authoritarianism. 

Released FBI File Shows Extent of Government Spying on Aretha Franklin

Beverly Gage says the surveillance was par for the course under J. Edgar Hoover's leadership, when Black figures with any suspected links to civil rights or militant politics was a target.

Will Biden Finally Pardon Callie House?

Callie House led an organization that sought pensions as a form of reparation and relief for formerly enslaved people. In 1917 unfriendly federal officials prosecuted her for mail fraud for circulating her organization's materials. 

ACLU, Educators and Students File to Block Florida's "Stop WOKE" Law

" The bill specifically targets and places vague restrictions on educators’ ability to teach and discuss concepts pertaining to systemic inequalities, including the legacy of slavery in America, white privilege, and anti-racism."

Review: David Sehat on the Struggle to Make a Secular America

by Johann N. Neem

In "This Earthly Frame," Sehat examines the way that activists in the 20th Century pushed the nation from an implicit privileging of Protestant Christianity toward a posture of "negative secularism" that separated the functions of government from doctrinal belief, and the transience of that victory. 

The Coming Pregnancy Surveillance State Will Bring "Homeland Security" to Women's Bodies

by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

The Dobbs ruling puts longstanding racist and nationalist beliefs that white women's reproductive labor is the price of their citizenship, and punitive controls on women of color, on collision course with the modern capacity of digital surveillance, threatening the criminalization of any miscarried pregnancy.