The Second Bill of Rights: FDRs Constitutional Vision and Why We Need It Today

How our economic rights are fundamental to the security and stability of our democracy.

From a prolific, insider author and leading legal scholar who has worked for former Presidents Obama and Biden.

In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a State of the Union Address that should be counted as the greatest political speech of the twentieth century. In it, Roosevelt grappled with the definition of security in a democracy, concluding that “unless there is security here at home, there cannot be lasting peace in the world.” To help ensure that security, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights”—economic rights that he saw as necessary to political freedom, including a right to education, a right to adequate health care, a right to a home, and a right to protection against destitution. Many of the great legislative achievements of the past eighty years stem from Roosevelt’s vision.

In The Second Bill of Rights, Cass Sunstein uses this speech as a launching point to show how these rights are vital to the continuing security of our nation. This is an ambitious, sweeping book that argues for a new vision of FDR, of constitutional history, and of our current political scene that has never been more urgent or more relevant.

Cass R. Sunstein is Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University, where he is the cofounder and codirector of the Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Law. Former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, he is the author of The Cost-Benefit Revolution, How Change Happens, Too Much Information, Sludge, Climate Justice (all published by the MIT Press), Nudge (with Richard H. Thaler), and other books.