With 'Shouting Fire', Alan Dershowitz returns to what he knows best and cares about most: rights - human rights, civil rights, and constitutional rights. He begins this readable and accessible book by posing the intriguing question: Where do rights come from?
Rejecting the traditional answers - God, nature, and positive law - Dershowitz offers a new and wholly original source of and justification for rights. He shows how rights come from wrongs, how our long experience with human injustice provides the essential building blocks for a theory of justice and rights. He then illustrates and amplifies his approach with a personal selection of his best and most provocative writings on rights and justice.
'Shouting Fire' covers a vast spectrum of civil liberties issues - everything from the right to choice, to the separation between church and state, to the Holocaust and its long shadows, to rights and the responses to terrorism.
The essays included here summarise Dershowitz's lifework, encapsulating nearly forty years' worth of pioneering rights battles.