Crystal Eastman and the Internationalist Beginnings of American Civil Liberties

The modern American civil liberties movement famously began with the United States\u27s intervention in World War I. Yet these beginnings have long raised a conundrum for civil liberties historians. Why did the American civil liberties movement arise precisely when so many sophisticated legal and political thinkers began to call into question the truth value of abstract rights claims? The puzzling rise of civil liberties in an age of pragmatic skepticism is all the more startling given that early leaders of the civil liberties movement were themselves leading rights skeptics. This Article offers a new interpretation of the rise of the modern American civil liberties movement. Our ostensibly domestic civil liberties movement--and indeed, the phrase civil liberties itself--has its roots in a pre-World War I international law cosmopolitanism. In particular, the social movement that coalesced around the phrase civil liberties developed as a group of self-consciously internationalist organizations. Led by people such as Crystal Eastman, a little-remembered, charismatic, progressive-era reformer and radical, these organizations had begun to question not just the abstract metaphysical truth of rights claims but also the usefulness of that other great abstraction of nineteenth-century law: sovereignty. The civil liberties movement in American law thus did indeed emerge out of a pragmatist critique of abstract legal fictions. The relevant abstraction, however, was not so much the formal concept of rights as the formal concept of nation-state sovereignty. With American intervention in World War I, obligations of loyalty to the nation-state compelled American internationalists such as Eastman, her colleague Roger Baldwin, and the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union to reframe their critique of sovereignty in terms made available by the constituent documents of American nationalism

Memorandum: Concerning the International Women\u27s Year Conference and Women\u27s Rights Project.

A memorandum from the American Civil Liberties Union on The Houston Women\u27s Conference. November 4, 1977

In the shadow of fear: American liberties, 1948-49

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/1342/thumbnail.jp

Defending Korematsu?: Reflections on Civil Liberties in Wartime

According to Justice William J. Brennan, After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary. But it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along. This Article examines that observation, using Korematsu as a vehicle for refining the claim and, I think, reducing it to a more defensible one. Part I opens my discussion, providing some qualifications to the broad claim about threats to civil liberties in wartime. Part II then deals with Korematsu and other historical examples of civil liberties in wartime. It identifies a pattern in those examples and provides a sketch of a social theory that might account for the pattern. Part III describes, in relatively optimistic terms, a process of social learning in which past examples of what come to be understood as incursions on civil liberties progressively reduce the scope of civil liberties violations in wartime. Part IV raises jurisprudential questions about the role of emergency powers in liberal constitutions. In the end, I defend Korematsu in the perhaps ironic sense that Korematsu was part of a process of social learning that both diminishes contemporary threats to civil liberties in our present situation and reproduces a framework of constitutionalism that ensures that such threats will be a permanent part of the constitutional landscape

Fighting Terrorism in an Electronic Age: Does the Patriot Act Unduly Compromise Our Civil Liberties?

The USA PATRIOT Act is tremendously controversial, both lauded by law enforcement and decried by civil liberties groups. This iBrief considers two of the Act\u27s communications monitoring provisions, concluding that each compromises civil liberties to a greater degree than is necessary to combat terrorism. Accordingly, Congress should revise the USA PATRIOT Act, bringing it into line with the Constitution

United States’ Compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

The U.S. government is engaged in targeted killings through drone strikes (and other aircraft) in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere, which have resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. U.S. practice is characterized by secrecy and an unwillingness even to engage directly with concerns about civilian harm, let alone to provide accountability for civilian deaths and injury. Despite calls for disclosure from UN experts and non- governmental organizations, the U.S. government uses vague and shifting legal standards, and fails to disclose the basis for strikes or the steps it takes to minimize harm to civilians and investigate reported violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law