Category: Panel Discussion on “Engaging Liberty’s Refuge”

This response paper highlights the author’s three objectives in writing Liberty‟s Refuge: one diagnostic, one historical, and one normative. The diagnosis highlights difficulties with the current doctrine of intimate and expressive association. The history excavates the prominent role that the right of assembly occupies in our constitutional and popular past. The normative theory contends that…

This paper addresses three specific issues: Professor Inazu‘s treatment of the always-contested divide between public and private, his overly narrow reading of the Supreme Court‘s intimate association doctrine, and his failure to distinguish exclusion from subordination. Although asking the woman question illuminates some of what is absent from Professor Inazu‘s analysis, the paper offers these…

As a political culture seemingly hard-wired for the full-throated championing of individual rights, we are not quite sure what to do with liberty claims by groups. Whether we are talking about corporate speech rights, the treatment of religious student groups at public universities, the limits of the ministerial exception, the Boy Scouts‘ right to discriminate,…

Liberty’s Refuge is an important book with a lot of original and interesting things to say about the First Amendment. In many ways, however, the best thing about this book is not just what it says, but how it says it. Impressively, while advancing strong and controversial positions, Professor Inazu somehow avoids the trap into…

This brief discussion of a book I greatly admire, by an author I am fortunate to know as a colleague and a friend, cannot hope to capture all of the book’s important and interesting contributions. I will simply describe three of the book’s primary facets. Liberty’s Refuge is, first, a work of intellectual history: Inazu…