Antonin Scalia, William Brennan, and the Politics of Expression: A Study of Legal Violence and Repression

Richard A. Brisbin

American Political Science Review, 1993, vol. 87, issue 4, 912-927

Abstract: The study of legal politics often attends to the description and explanation of the instrumental politics of legal change or to the mobilization of rights by individual citizens as an act of empowerment beneficial to their individual liberty. Drawing far less attention from the discipline is the privileged construction of a discourse or set of attitudes about rights by the judiciary. I present a case study of the First Amendment opinions of two members of the Supreme Court of the United States to criticize the range of their attitudes about rights and to illustrate how their opinions help construct and legitimate the disciplinary actions that provide order in the modern liberal regime. To preserve order, the justices are shown to use the language of rights as an instrument for the facilitation of violence, repression, and subjection against some litigants, rather than as an instrument for the enhancement of expressive liberties.

Date: 1993
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:87:y:1993:i:04:p:912-927_10

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().