Civil Liberties and the Bill of Rights

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Save More Than 50% Off the Monthly Plan with this Annual Plan Special Offer! Offer Ends 06/22/2025.

Learn More

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Reset Password

Enter the email address you used to create your account. We will email you instructions on how to reset your password.

Forgot Your Email Address? Contact Us

Reset Your Password

SHOW

01: What Are Civil Liberties?

In introducing students to the overall themes of the course and the methods and materials that will be used, we begin by noting that there is no easy or single answer to the misleadingly simple question, "What are civil liberties,"

33 min

02: The Bill of Rights—An Overview

The first constitutional document produced by the Philadelphia Convention did not include a bill of rights. We explore the history of the Bill of Rights, beginning with whether and why it was necessary and why it took the form that it did.

31 min

03: Two Types of Liberty—Positive and Negative

This lecture focuses primarily on one Supreme Court case and what it teaches about two issues concerning the breadth and scope of the Bill of Rights: the "state action doctrine" and the nature of the rights included in the Constitution.

31 min

04: The Court and Constitutional Interpretation

After a brief history of the Court's early years, we take up important institutional issues, including how justices are appointed; the nature and limits of judicial power; how the Court actually decides cases; and the question of when, if ever, the Court should refrain from deciding a case.

30 min

05: "Marbury v. Madison" and Judicial Review

This lecture introduces students to the practice of judicial review - the authority of the Supreme Court and other federal courts to declare some governmental action unconstitutional - on some accounts, the cornerstone of American constitutional order.

31 min

06: Private Property and the Founding

One of the Constitution's central purposes, according to the Preamble, is to secure the "Blessings of Liberty." There is little doubt, as we shall see in this lecture, that chief among those liberties at the founding was the right to own private property.

30 min

07: "Lochner v. New York" and Economic Due Process

The Court's protection for private property has waxed and waned. This lecture traces that process from its beginnings through the 20th century, and includes a close look at one of the Court's most infamous decisions.

31 min

08: The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment

Following the Court's rejection of economic due process, the right to property became substantially less important than it once was. However, a few cases arising under the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause suggest that the right to property may be more robust than it has seemed over the last few decades.

31 min

09: Fundamental Rights—Privacy and Personhood

We continue our examination of the relationship between liberty and community, broadening our focus to include the development of the constitutional right to privacy.

30 min

10: Privacy—Early Cases

Though there is no explicit provision in the Constitution that grants a comprehensive right to privacy, concern for privacy does appear in several places, including the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and other aspects of privacy intersect with the First Amendment's freedom of association.

31 min

11: "Roe v. Wade" and Reproductive Autonomy

Few topics in American law are as emotionally charged, and as doctrinally confused, as the discussion of abortion rights, encompassing not only the law, but also profound moral and political issues, and important questions about the role of the Supreme Court in American society.

31 min

12: Privacy and Autonomy—From "Roe" to "Casey"

We continue our examination of the consequences of Roe by exploring subsequent litigation, including the most recent cases involving abortion and reproductive autonomy, which have highlighted the issues of judicial power and accountability.

31 min

13: Other Privacy Interests—Family

As we have seen, the right to liberty is less a single right than a collection of diverse interests. The same is true of the right to privacy, an umbrella that covers a wide collection of more specific interests, including procreation, abortion, marriage, and sexuality.

31 min

14: Other Privacy Interests—Sexuality

Does the Constitution protect the choices we make about sexuality? Few areas of life, it might seem, are as private, but most societies also recognize a collective interest in regulating certain kinds of sexual conduct. We explore several cases that try to define that interest.

30 min

15: Same-Sex Marriages and the Constitution

Does the Constitution protect same-sex marriages? No decision by the Supreme Court has addressed this question directly, but we look at several cases that might be relevant to the issue.

31 min

16: The Right to Die and the Constitution

Few issues in civil liberties are as controversial as the question of whether the Constitution includes a right to die. We explore several cases that illustrate, in examining this question, how the most fundamental questions in civil liberties are not so much legal as moral.

30 min

17: Cruel and Unusual? The Death Penalty

The past few lectures have opened up questions that consider the relationship between self and society, between rights and responsibilities, and indeed about the meaning and definition of life itself. This lecture explores those issues in their most profound form: the death penalty.

31 min

18: The First Amendment—An Overview

From a few sparse words in the First Amendment, the Supreme Court has created a huge and complicated jurisprudence. In this lecture, we consider what the Founders may have meant when they sought to protect speech, as well as the equally important question of why they sought to protect speech.

31 min

19: Internal Security and the First Amendment

The reasons we protect speech are complex. This lecture explores whether there are times when we might not want to protect it, examining the depth of our commitment and asking who should balance the competing demands of the First Amendment and national security.

31 min

20: Symbolic Speech and Expressive Conduct

We begin four lectures that take up thorny questions about the meaning of speech and expression, the scope of the First Amendment's protections, and what we might choose to leave unprotected because it is not really speech.

31 min

21: Indecency and Obscenity

In several of our lectures we have wrestled with a problem of definition: What is speech? What isn't? In this lecture and the next we take up two different versions of this problem. In this lecture: Is pornography speech?

31 min

22: Hate Speech and Fighting Words

We examine the suppression of "hate speech" and the regulation of so-called "fighting words;" the debate over both highlights the tension between our commitment to freedom of expression and our collective interest in protecting values such as civility, social morality, and public order.

31 min

23: The Right to Silence

Does freedom of speech include the right not to speak? To refuse, for example, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or to tape over the state motto on an automobile license plate? We consider several cases.

31 min

24: Why Is Freedom of Religion So Complex?

The relationship between matters of the soul and matters of state is a subject of intense controversy in the United States. In this lecture we begin an extended inquiry into freedom of religion.

31 min

25: School Prayer and the Establishment Clause

This lecture considers several cases illustrating two drives once observed by Justice Wiley Blount Rutledge to be "constantly in motion to abridge, in the name of education, the complete division of religion and civil authority."

31 min

26: Religion—Strict Separation or Accommodation?

We examine another, perhaps larger, issue that has troubled the Court in recent years: Does the establishment clause require government neutrality toward all forms of religious belief and nonbelief, or does it simply prohibit the government from favoring one religion over another?

31 min

27: The Free Exercise Clause—Acting on Beliefs

Holding to a particular religious belief is one thing. Acting on that belief, however, can mean colliding with the rights of others or of the community. At what point should the community's interest in public order restrict an individual's right to free exercise?

30 min

28: Free Exercisee and “the Peyote Case”

This lecture examines whether a claim of free exercise can excuse some individuals simply because they are acting in accordance with their religion from the application of religiously "neutral" laws that would otherwise prohibit that action.

31 min

29: Two Religion Clauses—One Definition?

In a great many cases, the religion clauses work in tandem to secure religious freedom. In some cases, however, they appear to be at odds. We examine two illustrative cases.

31 min

30: Slavery and "Dred Scott" to Equal Protection

Equality has always been one of the basic ideals of the American constitutional order. The original text of the Constitution, however, did not completely reflect this ideal. This lecture examines the Court's treatment of racial discrimination from the Founding to the important case of "Dred Scott v. Sandford."

31 min

31: "Brown v. Board of Education"

This lecture explores the NAACP's systematic campaign for school desegregation - led by lead attorney Thurgood Marshall - that culminated in one of the Court's most historic rulings.

31 min

32: Equality and Affirmative Action

Does the remedial or benign purpose of affirmative action policies suggest the need for a special judicial test under the equal protection clause? This lecture explores how the Court has answered this question several times and in several ways.

31 min

33: Equality and Gender Discrimination

The ideal of equality is deeply rooted in our constitutional culture, even if we frequently fail to live up to it. In this lecture we take up one such area of discrimination on the basis of gender.

30 min

34: Gender Discrimination as Semi-Suspect

The Court has been unable to identify a clear standard of review that should govern gender classifications. We examine the decisions that have produced the Supreme Court's current test for the constitutionality of gender classification, which demands more than simple rationality but less than strict scrutiny.

31 min

35: The Future of Equal Protection?

We see the Court's continuing reluctance to use the strict scrutiny standard in a variety of equal protection cases. And we also observe a clear preference except for cases involving race or gender to defer to the democratic process.

31 min

36: Citizens and Civil Liberties

What overall conception of liberties, rights, and governmental powers most nearly reflects and promotes our best understanding of the Constitution? The final lecture examines how successful we have been in discovering an answer.

33 min

Overview Course No. 8530

The civil liberties and constitutional rights possessed by our nation's citizens are a uniquely American invention. And when we were taught history and learned about the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, we were always made aware of that uniqueness - of the extraordinary experiment that gave to every citizen of this new nation a gift possessed by no others.

Now you can learn exactly what that gift was - in a series of 36 lectures based on Supreme Court opinions from dozens of the Court's most important landmark decisions, presented by John Finn of Wesleyan University, an award-winning teacher who is also an internationally recognized expert in constitutional law.

You'll learn just what liberties and rights the Founders wanted the new government to protect, as well as how we get from what Professor Finn calls the Constitution's "wonderfully elastic and vague" language to the finely tuned specifics of the Supreme Court's opinions about speech, abortion, and religion, and so much more. And you'll grasp the hard truth that no matter how unwavering the Constitution's language on any subject may appear, things are almost invariably more complicated than it would seem at first reading.

The result is a legacy of questions that multiplies with each passing decade, and explains why generations of jurists and legal scholars, not to mention legislators, presidents, and citizens, have argued so long and hard about the meaning of what often appears to be unambiguous phrasing.

View Full Details

About

John E. Finn

ALMA MATER

Princeton University

INSTITUTION

Wesleyan University

John E. Finn is Professor of Government Emeritus at Wesleyan University, where he taught for thirty years. Finn received a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University, a J.D. from Georgetown University, a B.A. in political science from Nasson College, and a degree in culinary arts from the French Culinary Institute. His scholarly research and teaching focuses on constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, the first amendment, and the legal regulation of terrorism and political violence. Professor Finn is an internationally recognized expert on constitutional law and political violence. His public lectures include testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee, as well as lectures in Chile, Bolivia, Spain, Italy, Canada, England, and France.

Finn is the author of four highly regarded and influential books on constitutional law: Fracturing the Founding: How the Alt-Right Corrupts the Constitution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Peopling the Constitution (Kansas, 2014), American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes 4th ed. (coauthor, West Academic Publishing, 2018), and Constitutions in Crisis: Political Violence and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 1991), and of numerous scholarly articles in professional journals.

Finn’s research and scholarly writing also extends to the study of food, recipes, and politics. He has published a book on the history, philosophy, and meaning of omelets, including recipes, The Perfect Omelet (Countryman, 2017), and several essays and articles, including “How Does a Recipe Mean,” in Table Matters: A Journal of Food, Drink, and Manners (2016), an entry on “Measurements,” in The Oxford Companion to Sweets, ed. Darra Goldstein (2015), an essay on Julia Child in Gastronomica (2007), and articles on “The Perfect Recipe,” (2011) and “The Kitchen Voice as Confessional,” (2004) in Food, Culture & Society.

View Full Details