The Psychology of Rights and Duties:  Empirical Contributions and Normative Commentaries edited by Norman J. Finkel and Fathali M. Moghaddam
Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, c2005
K258 .P78 2005 Balcony

This cross-disciplinary book investigates how morality translates into action by presenting original psychological research on our understanding of rights and duties. This topical focus is especially timely in our post 9/11 world where the relative rights and duties of citizens and our government are foremost in our minds.

One of the book's goals is to explore the general public's ideas (both in the U.S. and abroad) about rights versus duties, so that legislative and policy changes can be based on solid support, not assumptions. Two strategies are used to lead readers toward a better understanding of human rights and duties.

Chapters by empirical researchers present findings on citizens' commonsense understandings of rights and duties, while normative chapters by leading social theorists conceptualize rights and duties from many perspectives. By contrasting present-day circumstances of life in many social spheres with the world of ideas, the editors expose the debate between what human rights and duties are and what they ought to be. The contributors respond to a number of provocative questions raised by the authors, including:

• Can duties have primacy over rights in one culture, while another is rights-centered?
• Are rights and duties imposed from the outside, or do they evolve as the self develops?
• Does a set of "universal" rights and duties exist?
• How does power in individual or group-to-group relationships affect rights and duties?

This book aims to distill the essentials of liberal constitutionalism from the jurisprudence and practice of contemporary liberal-democratic states. Most constitutional theorists have despaired of a liberal consensus on the fundamental goals of constitutional order. Instead they have contented themselves either with agreement on lower-level principles on which those who disagree on fundamentals may coincidentally converge, or, alternatively with a process for translating fundamental disagreement into acceptable laws.

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was born in Yorkshire in 1907 to second generation Jewish immigrants. Having won a scholarship to Oxford University, he went on to become the most famous legal philosopher of the twentieth century.

Opposites in almost every way, mortally suspicious of each other at first, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., were thrust together in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Both men sensed a historic opportunity and began a delicate dance of accommodation that moved them, and the entire nation, toward the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources -- Johnson's taped telephone conversations, voluminous FBI wiretap logs, previously secret communications between the FBI and the president -- Nick Kotz gives us a dramatic narrative, rich in dialogue, that presents this momentous period with thrilling immediacy. Judgment Days offers needed perspective on a presidency too often linked solely to the tragedy of Vietnam. We watch Johnson applying the arm-twisting tactics that made him a legend in the Senate, and we follow King as he keeps the pressure on in the South through protest and passive resistance. King's pragmatism and strategic leadership and Johnson's deeply held commitment to a just society shaped the character of their alliance. Kotz traces the inexorable convergence of their paths to an intense joint effort that made civil rights a legislative reality at last, despite FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's vicious whispering campaign to destroy King. Judgment Days also reveals how this spirit of teamwork disintegrated. The two leaders parted bitterly over King's opposition to the Vietnam War. In this first full account of the working relationship between Johnson and King, Kotz offers a detailed, surprising account that significantly enriches our understanding of both men and their time.

What is a family? Grandparents, mom, dad, and kids around a Thanksgiving turkey? An egg mother, a womb mother, a sperm donor, and their mutual child? Two gay men caring for their adopted son? In this provocative essay, a leading American legal historian argues that laws about family are increasingly laws about individuals and their right to make their own, sometimes contentious, choices.

Drawing on many revealing and sometimes colorful court cases of the past two centuries, Private Lives offers a lively short history of the complexities of family law and family life--including the tensions between the laws on the books and contemporary arrangements for marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing. Informal common-law marriage was once widely accepted as a means to regularize property arrangements, but it declined as the state asserted its authority to dictate who could marry and reproduce. In the twentieth century, state attempts to control private life were swept away, most famously in the creation of "no-fault" divorce, a system in which laws that made divorce nearly unattainable were circumvented.

Private life, the author argues, as a legitimate sphere, was once basically confined to life in nuclear families; but the modern law of "privacy" extends the accepted zone of intimate relations. The omnipresence of the media and our fascination with celebrity test the boundaries of public and private life. Meanwhile, laws about cohabitation and civil unions, among others, suggest that family and commitment, in their many forms, remain powerful ideals.

This volume, the first of two, charts the history and emergence of international law in the American common law tradition, from its English roots in the late 18th century to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. At the end of the 18th century it made little sense anywhere in the English-speaking world to talk of either international law or international lawyers, and yet fifty years later, international law had become a commonplace linguistic, legal, and political reality in America, and international lawyering had become a thriving profession.

Both the courts and the public seem confused about sexual harassment—what it is, how it functions, and what sorts of behaviors are actionable in court. Theresa M. Beiner contrasts perspectives from social scientists on the realities of workplace sexual harassment with the current legal standard. When it comes to sexual harassment law, all too often courts (and employers) are left in the difficult position of grappling with vague legal standards and little guidance about what sexual harassment is and what can be done to stop it. Often, courts impose their own stereotyped view of how women and men "ought" to behave in the workplace. This viewpoint, social science reveals, is frequently out of sync with reality.

As a legal scholar who takes social science seriously, Beiner provides valuable insight into what behaviors people perceive as sexually harassing, why such behavior can be characterized as discrimination because of sex, and what types of workplaces are more conducive to sexually harassing behavior than others. Throughout, Beiner offers proposals for legal reform with the goal of furthering workplace equality for both men and women.

This lively book reassesses a century of jurisprudential thought from a fresh perspective, and points to a malaise that currently afflicts not only legal theory but law in general. Steven Smith argues that our legal vocabulary and methods of reasoning presuppose classical ontological commitments that were explicitly articulated by thinkers from Aquinas to Coke to Blackstone, and even by Joseph Story. But these commitments are out of sync with the world view that prevails today in academic and professional thinking. So our law-talk thus degenerates into "just words"--or a kind of nonsense.

The diagnosis is similar to that offered by Holmes, the Legal Realists, and other critics over the past century, except that these critics assumed that the older ontological commitments were dead, or at least on their way to extinction; so their aim was to purge legal discourse of what they saw as an archaic and fading metaphysics. Smith's argument starts with essentially the same metaphysical predicament but moves in the opposite direction. Instead of avoiding or marginalizing the "ultimate questions," he argues that we need to face up to them and consider their implications for law.

Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day—even as you read this—electronic databases are compiling information about you. Ever since the Internet transformed the way we shop, learn, and communicate, computer databases have collected unprecedented amounts of information about almost every individual in the world. Small details that were once captured in dim memories or fading scraps of paper are now preserved forever in the digital minds of computers, in vast databases with fertile fields of personal information

These databases create a profile of activities, interests, and preferences for millions of people. Often these dossiers are used to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make a wide variety of decisions affecting our lives. This practice has, thus far, gone largely unchecked, and poses a grave threat to our privacy. In this startling revelation of how digital dossiers are created (usually without our knowledge), Daniel J. Solove argues that we must rethink our understanding of what privacy is and what it means in the digital age, and then reform the laws that define and regulate it.  Although the implications of digital dossiers may be grave, The Digital Person helps empower Internet users by exposing to them the reality of what happens when they input personal information into computers, and how they can push for legal reform that simultaneously protects their privacy and lets them enjoy the benefits of the information age.