Civil Rights in America (Cambridge Studies on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties)

The term 'civil rights' has such a familiar presence in discussions about American politics and law that we tend to use it reflexively and intuitively, but rarely do we stop to think about what exactly we mean when we use the term and why certain uses strike us as right or wrong. In this book, Professor Christopher W. Schmidt tells the story of how Americans have fought over the meaning of civil rights from the Civil War through today. Through their struggles over what it means to live in a nation dedicated to protecting civil rights, each generation has given the label new life and new meaning. Civil Rights in America shows how the words we use to understand our world become objects of contestation and points of leverage for social, political, and legal action.

Christopher W. Schmidt is a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he serves as the Associate Dean for Faculty Development and co-director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States, a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and the editor of Law & Social Inquiry. Professor Schmidt received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is the author of The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (2018).