A New Birth of Freedom: Human Rights, Named and Unnamed

In American courts and especially among students of the Constitution, there has long been a tension between two competing understandings of the law: namely, between those that hold that the law's purpose is merely to guarantee fair procedure and those who go further and say that its purpose is to guarantee other more substantive rights as well. Constitutional lawyer Charles Black, who helped craft the arguments that carried the day in Brown vs. Board of Education, has for many years planted his flag firmly in the latter camp. In this book, citing as authority the Declaration of Independence and the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, he argues this anew, and holds that it's up to the federal judiciary to be the bulwark that protects against all infringements by federal, state, and local governments.