The Rights Revolution Revisited Institutional Perspectives on the Private Enforcement of Civil Rights in the US

The rights revolution in the United States consisted of both sweeping changes in constitutional doctrines and landmark legislative reform, followed by decades of innovative implementation in every branch of the federal government - Congress, agencies, and the courts. In recent years, a growing number of political scientists have sought to integrate studies of the rights revolution into accounts of the contemporary American state. In The Rights Revolution Revisited, a distinguished group of political scientists and legal scholars explore the institutional dynamics, scope, and durability of the rights revolution. By offering an inter-branch analysis of the development of civil rights laws and policies that features the role of private enforcement, this volume enriches our understanding of the rise of the 'civil rights state' and its fate in the current era.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Reassessing the rights revolution Lynda G. Dodd; Part II. Implementing the Rights Revolution: 2. Approaches to enforcing the rights revolution: private civil rights litigation and the American bureaucracy Quinn Mulroy; 3. Mobilizing rights at the agency level: the first interpretations of Title VII's sex provision Jennifer Woodward; 4. Motivating litigants to enforce public goods: evidence from employment, housing, and voting discrimination policy Paul Gardner; 5. Regulatory rights: civil rights agencies, courts, and the entrenchment of language rights Ming Hsu Chen; 6. Sexual harassment and the evolving civil rights state R. Shep Melnick; 7. The civil rights template and the Americans with Disabilities Act: a socio-legal perspective on the promise and limits of individual rights Thomas F. Burke and Jeb Barnes; Part III. Rights and Retrenchment: 8. Retrenching civil rights litigation: why the court succeeded where congress failed Stephen Burbank and Sean Farhang; 9. The contours of the Supreme Court's civil rights counterrevolution Lynda G. Dodd; 10. Constraining aid, retrenching access: legal services after the rights revolution Sarah Staszak; Part IV. The Future of the Rights Revolution: 11. Rationalizing rights: political control of litigation David Freeman Engstrom; 12. The future of private enforcement of civil rights Lynda G. Dodd.

Lynda G. Dodd is the Joseph H. Flom Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science at the City College, City University of New York. She graduated from Yale Law School in 2000, completed a Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University, New Jersey in 2004, and was a member of the law school faculty at American University's Washington College of Law from 2005–2010. Her next book, Taming the Rights Revolution: The Supreme Court, Constitutional Torts, and the Elusive Quest for Accountability (Cambridge, forthcoming), examines the history of civil rights litigation under Section 1983.