American Civil Liberties and Constitutional Change
Donald P. Kommers (1932–2018) was a political scientist and legal scholar well known for his writings on German law and politics and his pioneering work in the field of comparative constitutional studies. He joined the University of Notre Dame's faculty in 1963 and received the Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie Chair of Political Science in 1991. He taught a wide variety of courses on American and comparative politics until turning most of his attention to the constitutional systems of both Germany and the United States. At the University of Notre Dame, he served as the director of the Law School’s Center for Civil and International Human Rights from 1976 to 1981 and as the editor of The Review of Politics from 1981 to 1992. Upon retirement, he continued to teach in the undergraduate constitutional studies program and offered an advanced seminar in comparative constitutional law at Notre Dame Law School.
Abstract
This essay is an attempt to analyze, for the non-American reader especially, some of the factors that affect the condition of civil liberties in the United States. It deals mainly with the U.S. Supreme Court and its effort to define the limits of personal freedom within the framework of the American constitutional system. This effort has been a main preoccupation of the Supreme Court during the last two decades or so as the social conflicts besetting America have taken the form, as they usually do, of constitutional conflicts that the Court must eventually decide. Most of these questions have represented deep value conflicts in society as a whole. Indeed the divisions on the Supreme Court itself are fairly representative of these conflicts. What makes these conflicts, in both the society and on the Supreme Court, so important is that they involve changed perspectives on the nature of a free society.