Description: Written by leading authorities in history, philosophy, jurisprudence and political theory, the essays in this volume provide new insights into the variable and changing contents of the rights thinking and consciousness that lie at the core of American political culture and shape its central political institutions. Based on the current state of scholarly understanding and intended to provide a fresh sense of orientation into the complexities of the separate topics covered, the studies focus on two distinct "moments" in the American experience: the eighteenth-century period of founding that produced the Bill of Rights as an element in the Constitutional settlement, and the contemporary moment, marked by a new historical consciousness of the difficulties of interpreting rights in changing contexts and thus by the continuing search for a properly grounded philosophical jurisprudence adequate to meet the ethical, social, and political conflicts of the present.
Review Quotes: "A Culture of Rights, the product of a workshop series organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in commemoration of the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, is a marvelous collection of essays containing some of the very best scholarship to emerge from the seemingly interminable celebration of the federal Constitution's creation. Editors Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen have assembled works that deal creatively with the historical context of the Bill of Rights, with its modern transformation into the center of American constitutional law, and with some of the difficult philosophical and jurisprudential problems that cluster around the notion of 'rights.'" H. Jefferson Powell, The Journal of American History