Elgar Studies in Law and Civil Liberties

This series explores twenty-first century challenges to civil liberties and to twentieth-century conceptions of civil liberties. It provides a forum for interdisciplinary, international, and comparative analysis of the extent to which changing circumstances have been or should be leading us to adapt our traditional understandings of civil liberties, including even the definition of the category. The 2020 pandemic provided a stress test for our expectations about individual liberty and privacy; discourse about the tension between civil liberties and civil rights or broader concepts of equality is widespread; developing technology, including the world of the Internet and social media, challenges our traditional conceptions of free speech and association as well as our expectations about personal privacy; our understanding of the nature of gender has been transformed, upsetting earlier ideas about the binary nature of gender and the power of individuals to affirm their own gender identity; on the political front, the rise of authoritarianism around the world has threatened what were thought to be settled expectations about the boundaries of governmental action.

The series offers an opportunity for collective reflection on the most profound questions about the nature of civil liberties. To what extent should we expect our conceptions of particular civil liberties or civil liberties principles in general to change through time? How do we identify which principles to regard as foundational and timeless? Should our aspiration be to develop and maintain concepts of civil liberties that are universal?

Both monographs and edited collections are welcome.