Böcker av Gordon Albert Babst

The edited volume brings together contemporary work by philosophers, legal scholars, and political theorists. This volume presents relevant understandings of the common good, democracy, liberty, and law, and situates them in the context of contemporary countervailing pressures posed by issues in education, access to medical treatment in a pandemic, and the media. Motivated to ascertain how democracy is threatened by a variety contemporary challenges, the authors examine core aspects of law, representative democracy, and constitutionalism to shed light on worrisome contemporary phenomena such as social media-driven conspiracy theories, unequal access to education and medical treatment, among other topics.

Liberal Constitutionalism, Marriage, and Sexual Orientation: A Contemporary Case for Dis-Establishment uses constitutional theory and political philosophy to shed light on an elusive feature of American jurisprudence: the establishment of a sectarian preference in the law to the detriment of American citizens who happen to be gay or lesbian and who wish to exercise their fundamental right to marry. Reviewing aspects of liberal-democratic theory, marriage law, and pertinent analogies that deal with the right to marry, Gordon Albert Babst presents the notion of the «shadow establishment,» which makes the best sense of a constitutional affirmation of bias against same-sex marriage and gay persons in the law.