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

Offers a constitutional argument, based on the Declaration of Independence, the Ninth Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment, for changing the way the government deals with everything from zoning laws to welfare reform in relation to human rights.

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.