Civil Liberties

As president of the Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs advocated for the disempowered, the disenfranchised, the marginalised. She withstood relentless political pressure and media scrutiny as she defended the defenceless for five tumultuous years. How did this aspiring ballet dancer, dignified daughter of a tank commander and eminent law academic respond when appreciative passengers on a full airplane departing Canberra greeted her with a round of applause?

Possibly the most emotionally charged debate taking place in the US today centers on the Second Amendment and the rights of citizens to bear arms. In the wake of school massacres, the gun rights movement, headed by the National Rifle Association, appears more intractable than ever in its fight against gun control laws. Their core argument is that the proliferation of firearms is essential to maintaining freedom in America, providing private citizens with a defense against possible government tyranny, and thus safeguarding all our other rights. But is this argument valid? Do guns indeed make us free?

Med sit helt særlige talent for at gøre fortiden levende, fortæller Pia Fris Laneth i 1915 historien om, hvordan kvinder og tyende blev borgere. Det er historien om, hvordan det danske folkestyre blev demokratisk, fra Enevældens afskaffelse i 1849 og frem til 1915 - 66 års hårdt arbejde for opnåelsen af retten til at uddanne sig, drive selvstændig virksomhed, organisere sig og deltage i politik samt juridisk ligestilling i ægteskabet.

No two public figures were more crucial in the drama of race relations in this era than Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Fifty years after they were both murdered, noted journalist David Margolick explores the untold story of the complex and ever-evolving relationship between these two American icons. Assassinated only 62 days apart in 1968, King and Kennedy changed the United States forever, and their deaths profoundly altered the country’s trajectory.

Now is an extraordinary time. Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Reverberations of shock and outrage remain with us all. There's a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and articulates all of these roiling sentiments unleashed by a profound national reckoning.

Censorship's Grave looks at modern methods of circumventing censorship and counteracting effects of information warfare. It argues that autocrats are losing the battle of censorship in an information age they no longer control. Unfortunately, the new information age contains a spectrum of arguments - from truth to blatant lies. The book was written by an author who has traveled extensively in countries with restricted media and used circumvention tools in all of them. It conveys a warning to not trade one disinfo system for another one.

For a century, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought to keep Americans in touch with the founding values of the Constitution. As its centennial approached, the organization invited Ellis Cose to become its first ever writer-in residence, serving as an "embedded journalist" with complete editorial independence. The result is Cose's groundbreaking Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU and Its 100-Year Battle for Our Rights, the most authoritative account ever of America's premier defender of civil liberties.

This biography of a seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and more.

Hubert Humphrey was one of the great liberal leaders of postwar American politics, yet because he never made it to the Oval Office, he has been largely overlooked by biographers. Historian Arnold A. Offner has explored vast troves of archival records to recapture Humphrey's life, giving us previously unknown details of the vice president's fractious relationship with Lyndon Johnson, showing how Johnson colluded with Richard Nixon to deny Humphrey the presidency, and describing the most neglected aspect of Humphrey's career.

The Torture Machine takes listeners from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark - and the historic 13-years of litigation that followed - through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of On Liberty, written and read by Shami Chakrabarti. On 11 September 2001, our world changed. The West's response to 9/11 has morphed into a period of exception. Governments have decided that the rule of law and human rights are...

In The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, seasoned political analyst David Leach draws on his years of experience in the political arena to expose the players in this war. This groundbreaking book examines the current state of liberty in America, exposing how politicians, religious leaders, and members of the media have become allies in an open attack on our God-given rights. Through persuasive examination, Leach reveals how these advocates of bigger, more powerful government have systematically redefined liberty as we understand it.

This investigation into the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how the police and justice system use surveillance technology asks the question: what are citizens of a free country willing to tolerate in the name of public safety? The police now have unparalleled power at their...

This book is a general introduction to advocacy for change that many sectors of the United States of America want to see. It aims to support such a call by providing essential information based on real facts and events; the truth of which, no one can deny. I have always tried to make this book echo reality in a way that makes people aware of the need to abolish racism, xenophobia, and the air of the ethnic cleansing trend.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that little Linda Brown couldn't be excluded from a public school because of her race. In that landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the court famously declared that public education must be available to all on equal terms. But 66 years later, many of the best public schools remain closed to all but the most privileged families. Empowered by little-known state laws, school districts draw attendance zones around their best schools, indicating who is, and who isn't, allowed to enroll.

In American Hate: Survivors Speak Out, Arjun Singh Sethi, a community activist and civil rights lawyer, chronicles the stories of individuals affected by hate. In a series of powerful, unfiltered testimonials, survivors tell their stories in their own words and describe how the bigoted rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration have intensified bullying, discrimination, and even violence toward them and their communities.

In the early 20th century over 200 of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names - Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney, and the like - carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause.

In May 2010, an intelligence analyst in the US Army's 10th Mountain Division was arrested on suspicion of leaking nearly half a million classified government documents, including the infamous "Collateral Murder" gunsight video and 260,000 State Department cables. After nine months in solitary confinement, the suspect now awaits court-martial in Fort Leavenworth. He is 24, comes from Crescent, Oklahoma, and his name is Bradley Manning.

G. Gordon Liddy's wit, wisdom, and no-holds-barred approach brought legions of devoted listeners to his daily radio program, and made his autobiography, Will, a monumental best seller. Now he brings the same inimitable style to When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. Listeners will be alternately infuriated and amused - but always enthralled - as "The G-Man" reveals what has been wrought by liberal politicians, government bureaucrats, "enviro-radicals", "fulminating feminists", and many others.

More than any other people on earth, Americans are free to say and write what they think. The reason for this extraordinary freedom is not a superior culture of tolerance, but just 14 words in our most fundamental legal document: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Anthony Lewis tells us how these rights were created, revealing a story of hard choices, heroic (and some less heroic) judges, and fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face-to-face with one of America's great founding ideas.