Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools

Book review of "Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools" by Lino A. Graglia

Moral Equality?

The particular version of the foregoing question I address in the following pages is this: What nontheistic reason or reasons do we have, if any, to accept the morality of human rights, a core constituent of which is the right to moral equality: the right of every human being to be treated as the moral equal of every other human being in this sense: as equally entitled with every other human being to be treated—as no less worthy than any other human being of being treated—in what Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls “a spirit of brotherhood.” By “the morality of human rights” (as I call it), I mean the particular morality embodied in the Universal Declaration

Constitutional Rights as Human Rights: Freedom of Speech, Equal Protection, and the Right of Privacy

Much of my recent scholarly work has addressed questions concerning the political morality - the global political morality of human rights. This essay continues in that vein; I focus on a relationship I began to discuss almost forty years ago, in my first book: the relationship between (some) constitutional rights and (some) human rights. My overarching claim here: There is a significant interface between the constitutional law of the United States and the political morality of human rights. My principal aim in this Essay is to defend (and illustrate) that broad claim by defending three narrower claims: 1. The constitutional right to freedom of speech is closely related to the human right to intellectual freedom: The former right protects against the same kinds of government action that the latter right protects against. 2. The constitutional right to equal protection is closely related to the human right to moral equality: The former right protects against the same kinds of government action that the latter right protects against. 3. The constitutional right of privacy - aptly described by legal scholar Reva Siegel as one of the most fiercely contested rights in the modern constitutional canon - is closely related to the human right to moral freedom: The former right is best understood as a version of the latter right and, so understood, is legitimately regarded as a constitutional right

Freedom of Conscience as Religious and Moral Freedom

In another essay being published contemporaneously with this one, I have explained that as the concept human right is understood both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in all the various international human rights treaties that have followed in the Universal Declaration\u27s wake, a right is a human right if the rationale for establishing and protecting the right-for example, as a treaty-based right-is, in part, that conduct that violates the right violates the imperative, articulated in Article i of the Universal Declaration, to act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood. Each of the human rights articulated in the Universal Declaration and/or in one or more international human rights treaties-for example, the right, articulated in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration and elsewhere, not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment -is a specification of what, in conjunction with other considerations, the imperative-which functions in the morality of human rights as the normative ground of human rights-is thought to forbid (or to require). A particular specification is controversial if and to the extent the supporting claim-a claim to the effect that the act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood imperative forbids (or requires) X-is controversial. My aim in this essay is to elaborate and defend a particular specification: the right, internationally recognized as a human right, to freedom of conscience-to freedom, that is, to live one\u27s life in accord with the deliverances of one\u27s conscience