Samuel Walker

A history of the American Civil Liberties Union. It recounts the ACLU's stormy history since its founding in 1920 to fight for free speech and explores its involvement in some of the most famous causes in American history, including the Scopes ""monkey trial"" and the civil rights movement.

The most dramatic change in American society in the last forty years has been the explosive growth of personal rights. This "Rights Revolution" is currently under attack by both mainstream conservatives and intellectual liberals as undermining traditional values of community. In replying to the critics, Samuel Walker details the history of the rise of rights in American society, from the birth of the civil rights movement to today, and provides a spirited defense of its success in actually enlarging and enriching our sense of community in the USA.

The First Amendment protects even the most offensive forms of expression: racial slurs, hateful religious propaganda, and cross-burning. No other county in the world offers the same kind of protection to offensive speech. How did this free speech tradition develop? Hate Speech provides the first comprehensive account of the history of the hate speech controversy in the United States. Samuel Walker examines the issue, from the conflicts over the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and American Nazi groups in the 1930s, tot he famous Skokie episode in 1977-78, and the campus culture wars of the 1990s. The author argues that the civil rights movement played a central role in developing this country's strong free speech tradition. The courts were very concerned about protecting the provocative and even offensive forms of expression by civil rights forces. Civil rights groups, therefore, preferred to protect rather than restrict offensive speech—even if it meant protecting racist speech.

Since the American Bar Foundation Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice (1953 - 1969) "discovered" the phenomenon of discretion in criminal justice, it has become something of a truism that the administration of criminal justice in the United States consists of a series of discretionary decisions by officials in regard to police discretion, bail, plea bargaining and sentencing. This book is a history of the attempts over the past forty years to control these discretionary powers in the criminal justice system. Walker brings together an enormous literature in a synthesis that will be of great value to professionals, reformers and students of the criminal justice system. In a field which largely produces short-ranged "evaluation research", this study, in taking a wider approach, distinguishes between the role of the courts and the role of administrative bodies (the police) and evaluates the longer-term trends and the successful reforms in criminal justice history.

Since its founding after World War I, the American Civil Liberties Union has become an integral part of American society. The history of the ACLU parallels the extension of civil rights and liberties in the United States. With a total of 1454 entries spanning almost three quarters of a century, this annotated bibliography provides an important research tool for scholars, attorneys, and policy analysts. The author has organized the work into six chapters: general works concerning the ACLU, the history of the organization, contemporary and related civil liberties issues, ACLU leaders, and resources to guide scholars.