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dc.contributor.authorDinan, John J.
dc.date.accessioned2021-10-13T20:47:16Z
dc.date.available2021-10-13T20:47:16Z
dc.date.issued1998-09-07
dc.identifier.isbn978-0-7006-3085-1
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1808/32162
dc.descriptionJohn J. Dinan is professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University. He Is the author of four books on American politics, most recently State Constitutional Politics: Governing by Amendment in the American States. This was his first book.en_US
dc.descriptionWith a New Preface by the Author.
dc.descriptionThis Kansas Open Books title is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
dc.description.abstractWhich branch of government should be entrusted with safeguarding individual rights? Conventional wisdom assigns this responsibility to the courts, on the grounds that liberty can only be protected through judicial interpretation of bills of rights. In fact it is difficult for many people even to conceive of any other way that rights might be protected. John Dinan challenges this understanding by tracing and evaluating the different methods that have been used to protect rights in the United States from the founding until the present era.

By examining legislative statutes, judicial decisions, convention proceedings, and popular initiatives in four representative states—Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan, and Oregon—Dinan shows that rights have been secured in the American polity in three principal ways. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rights were protected primarily through representative institutions. Then in the early twentieth century, citizens began to turn to direct democratic institutions to secure their rights. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that judges came to be seen as the chief protectors of liberties.

By analyzing the relative ability of legislators, citizens, and judges to serve as guardians of rights, Dinan's study demonstrates that each is capable of securing certain rights in certain situations. Elected representatives are generally capable of protecting most rights, but popular initiatives provide an effective mechanism for securing rights in the face of legislative intransigence, and judicial decisions offer a superior means of protecting liberties in crisis times. Accordingly, rather than viewing rights protection as the peculiar province of any single institution, this task ought to be considered the proper responsibility of all these institutions.

By undertaking a comparison of these institutional methods across such a wide expanse of time, Keeping the People's Liberties makes a highly original contribution to the literature on rights protection and provides a new perspective on debates about the contemporary role of representative, populist, and judicial institutions.
en_US
dc.format.extentxii, 260 pp.
dc.publisherUniversity Press of Kansasen_US
dc.relation.isversionofhttps://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-3147-6.htmlen_US
dc.rights© 1998, 2021 by the University Press of Kansas All rights reserved. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License.en_US
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0en_US
dc.titleKeeping the People's Liberties: Legislators, Citizens, and Judges as Guardians of Rightsen_US
dc.typeBooken_US
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.17161/1808.32162
dc.rights.accessrightsopenAccessen_US


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© 1998, 2021 by the University Press of Kansas
All rights reserved.
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License.
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: © 1998, 2021 by the University Press of Kansas All rights reserved. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License.