Human Rights in the Constitutional Law of the United States

Michael J. Perry holds a Robert W. Woodruff Chair at Emory University, where he teaches in the law school. Previously, Perry held the Howard J. Trienens Chair in Law at Northwestern University, where he taught for fifteen years, and the University Distinguished Chair in Law at Wake Forest University. Perry has written on American constitutional law and theory; law, morality and religion; and human rights theory in more than sixty articles and eleven books, including The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy, The Idea of Human Rights, We the People: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court, Under God? Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy, Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts, and Constitutional Rights, Moral Controversy, and the Supreme Court.

• Part I. The Morality of Human Rights: 1. The internationalization of human rights; 2. What is a 'human right'?; 3. The normative ground of human rights; Part II. The Constitutional Morality of the United States: 4. Capital punishment; 5. The question of judicial deference; 6. The right to moral equality; 7. The right to religious and moral freedom; 8. Same-sex marriage; 9. Abortion.

'Michael J. Perry has done it again, offering new and provocative insights about political morality, human rights, and constitutional law. Writing with clarity and grace, [he] connects the morality of international human rights, which is grounded in 'a spirit of brotherhood', to the constitutional morality of the United States. In so doing, he provides a rich and nuanced perspective for examining the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and abortion, casting these issues in a new light and permitting an analysis that is novel, penetrating, and powerful.' Daniel O. Conkle, Robert H. McKinney Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law