Human Rights Of, By, and for the People ─ How to Critique and Change the US Constitution

Together, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights comprise the constitutional foundation of the USA. These--the oldest governing documents still in use in the world--urgently need an update—just as the constitution of other countries have been updated and revised. This book brings together lawyers and sociologists to show how globalization, climate change, and sustainable development offer an opportunity to revisit the founding documents. Each chapter proposes specific changes that would more closely align U.S. law to international law. The chapters also illustrate how constitutions are embedded in society and shaped by culture.

The Constitution itself sets up contentious relationships among the three branches of government and between the federal government and each state government, while the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments begrudgingly recognize the civil and political rights of citizens. These rights are described by legal scholars as "negative rights," specifically as freedoms from infringements rather than as positive rights that affirm personhood and human dignity.

The chapter authors offer "positive rights" instead. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), written in the middle of the last century, inspires these updates. Nearly every other constitution in the world has adopted language from the UDHR. Our authors use intersectionality, critical race theory, and contemporary critiques of runaway economic inequality to ground our interventions in sociological argument.

Louis Edgar Esparza is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at California State University at Los Angeles. His research has appeared in Sociological Forum, Contemporary Justice Review, Environment & Society, Qualitative Sociology, and Societies Without Borders. His essays have appeared in The Progressive & In These Times.

Judith Blau is Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, retiring in 2014 after a teaching career that spanned 45 years. In 2012 she was awarded the Distinguished Career Award by the American Sociological Association. She is past president of the Southern Sociological Society, and former editor of Social Forces and of Societies without Borders. Her books include the 1^st edition of the Primer; Sociology and Human Rights (2011); The World and U.S. Social Forums (2009); The Leading Rogue State (2008); Freedoms and Solidarities (2007); Public Sociology Reader (2006); Human Rights: Beyond the Liberal Vision (2005); Blackwell Companion to Sociology (2004); and Race in the Schools (2003).

Keri E. Iyall Smith's research explores the intersections between human rights doctrine, the state, and indigenous peoples in the context of a globalizing society. She is assistant professor of sociology at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, where she teaches courses on globalization, sociological theory, Native Americans, and introductory sociology. She is a former vice president of Sociologists without Borders.