The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy

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 ten books, including 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. Liberal Democracy, Human Rights, and Religious Faith: 1. Liberal democracy and human rights; 2. Liberal democracy and religious faith; Part II. First Principles: 3. The right to moral equality; 4. The right to religious freedom; 5. Beyond religious freedom: the right to moral freedom; 6. Religion as a basis of lawmaking; Part III. First Principles Applied: 7. Abortion; 8. Same-sex unions; Part IV. The Constitution of Liberal Democracy: 9. Protecting constitutionally entrenched rights: the courts' - in particular, the US Supreme Court's - proper rule.

Reviews of the hardback: 'Michael Perry is clearly one of our best and most prolific legal scholars, and The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy is one of his finest books. Not the least strength of this volume is the way Perry artfully performs what he commends to us. The thoughtful, challenging arguments Perry offers teach us in the doing how Perry would have us conduct our political arguments with one another.' Milner S. Ball, Harmon W. Caldwell Chair Emeritus in Constitutional Law, University of Georgia