Abstract: The fi ftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s historic decision to strike down school segregation as unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education provides an especially important opportunity to bring together studies that shed light on questions begged by Brown and other landmark civil rights cases: What role does the law play in fostering social change? Can new rights guaranteed under law infl uence widespread and often taken-for-granted cultural belief systems and thus ensure that minorities are afforded the same privileges as members of the majority? Following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, there have been several infl uential books that have explored these questions from a sociolegal perspective (Rosenberg 1991; Scheingold 1974). The New Civil Rights Research differs from these early studies in one very important respect. This collection explicitly avoids a focus on an objective evaluation of the “effectiveness” of rights. Specifi cally, the research collected in this book builds on and goes beyond a legal mobilization approach to rights (McCann 1994; Silverstein 1996), as it places in the center of the analysis people’s understandings of rights. In so doing, The New Civil Rights Research privileges the everyday stories, experiences, interactions, and rhetoric of disadvantaged individuals, social activists, and ordinary people. This volume brings together a diverse array of studies that employ a more cultural perspective of rights. Some of the contexts explored are more traditional in nature (employment discrimination, educational justice, welfare rights, etc.), while others search for law’s role and meaning in very different settings such as the street. The chapters in this book take a fresh – indeed, a new – approach to exploring this vitally important question. Rather than focusing on rights from the top-down – that is, how judicial decisions impact social change – the approach taken by the contributors to the New Civil Rights Research focuses on law from the bottom up. How do individuals experience their legal rights in action?
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 7
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