Group-differentiated rights, or rights that attach on the basis of membership in a particular social or cultural group, are an increasingly common and controversial aspect of modern pluralistic legal systems. Eric Mitnick offers the first comprehensive treatment of this important form of right. The book describes and critically assesses the group-differentiated form of 'right' from within analytical, constitutive and liberal theory. It further examines the extent to which group-differentiated rights constitute aspects of human identity, and it asks whether this should be a cause for concern from the perspective of liberal theory. The more detailed normative work advanced in the book contextually applies the constitutive understanding of rights and the principles of liberal membership to particular examples of group-differentiated citizenship. Such examples range from ascriptive statuses such as slavery and alienage, to more affirmative classifications, such as those apparent in the contexts of civil unions and affirmative action, finally to the claims of religious and other cultural groups for official recognition and accommodation of group-based beliefs and practices.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support." By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers, and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty, and welfare in the century to come.

Reproduction of the original: The Right to Privacy by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis