This Is Not Civil Rights

Discovering Rights Talk in 1939 America

Lovell George I.

Since at least the time of Tocqueville, observers have noted that Americans draw on the language of rights when expressing dissatisfaction with political and social conditions. As the United States confronts a complicated set of twenty-first-century problems, that tradition continues, with Americans invoking symbolic events of the founding era to frame calls for change. Most observers have been critical of such "rights talk". Scholars on the left worry that it limits the range of political demands to those that can be articulated as legally recognized rights, while conservatives fear that it creates unrealistic expectations of entitlement.

Drawing on a remarkable cache of Depression-era complaint letters written by ordinary Americans to the Justice Department, George I. Lovell challenges these common claims. Although the letters were written prior to the emergence of the modern civil rights movement – which most people assume is the origin of rights talk – many contain novel legal arguments, including expansive demands for new entitlements that went beyond what authorities had regarded as legitimate or required by law. Lovell demonstrates that rights talk is more malleable and less constraining than is generally believed. Americans, he shows, are capable of deploying idealized legal claims as a rhetorical tool for expressing their aspirations for a more just society while retaining a realistic understanding that the law often falls short of its own ideals.

Content

Preface
Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Voices from Peoria
Chapter 2. The CRS's Legal and Political Strategies for Improving Civil Rights Protections
Chapter 3. Dead Dogs, Bad Divorces, and, Dope-Peddling Sheriffs: The Subject Matter of Civil Rights Complaint Letters
Chapter 4. The Common Place of Lawyering: Using Legal and Constitutional Arguments to Support Novel Civil Rights Claims
Chapter 5. Underlying Commitments of Rights Claiming: Extralegal Persuasive Claims and Citizen Understandings of Law
Chapter 6. In Defense of Extravagant Rights Talk

Appendix: Notes on the Archival Sources

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"A masterly and potentially pathbreaking analysis of American 'rights talk', a much-maligned but largely misunderstood phenomenon. Using a trove of letters written in 1939 and 1940 by ordinary Americans to the Justice Department's then-new Civil Liberties Unit, George I. Lovell shows that many of the standard claims about American rights talk are wrong; beyond the fervent hope for a rights-regulated society lies a worldly wise realism about rights' limited capacity to bring about real change" – Charles R. Epp, University of Kansas

"With 'This Is Not Civil Rights', George I. Lovell makes an invaluable contribution to the study of 'rights talk' and legal consciousness in the United States. His arguments will compel scholars to rethink the relationship between ordinary people, government power, and the emancipatory potential of law" – Keith J. Bybee, Syracuse University

"George I. Lovell has written a fascinating, important, and page-turning account of how ordinary people in American history have insisted that government take into account and respond to their vision of what constitutes fundamental rights. This is both an instant classic in law and society and a vital resource for proponents of popular constitutionalism" – Mark Graber, University of Maryland

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