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This chapter proposes a “principle of public relevance,” which claims that when beliefs, expression, and practices conflict with the ideal of free and equal citizenship, they should be changed to make them compatible with that ideal. There are two ways to fulfill the principle of public relevance, consistent with a respect for rights. The first way, “reflective revision,” emphasizes the duty of citizens to incorporate the ideal of free and equal citizenship into their own set of beliefs and practices. The second way is “democratic persuasion.” It gives the state and citizens two duties: they should convince other citizens to adopt the ideal of free and equal citizenship, and they should criticize policies and positions that oppose free and equal citizenship. Together, reflective revision and democratic persuasion specify how the principle of public relevance can be realized.

This chapter discusses the conception of “publicly justifiable privacy,” which clarifies the implications of the principle of public relevance for thinking about the divide between public and private. This conception of publicly justifiable privacy challenges the traditional liberal approach of separating public values from the internal dynamics of the family and civil society. According to publicly justifiable privacy, family and civil society practices that conflict with free and equal citizenship should be protected by rights, but ideally should be amended to be compatible with public values. The chapter then argues that people should engage in reflective revision to change those personal beliefs and practices.

This chapter examines the notion that, while persuasion should not be backed by coercive force, it should be backed by the state's subsidy power. It defines subsidy power as the ability of the state to spend money and, as crucially, to refuse to spend money on certain organizations. The state's subsidy power includes the ability to grant or withdraw tax-exempt, tax-deductible non-profit status. Its use is compatible with the right of free expression. Indeed, the chapter argues that the reasons justifying free expression require the state to withdraw subsidies from groups that oppose the core values of free and equal citizenship.

This concluding chapter examines some possible further implications of democratic persuasion that might be a source for further study. The first implication is that the book's view might serve as a model for other states that seek an alternative to the two dominant approaches to free speech. The third approach, democratic persuasion, allows free speech advocates to retain the protections against coercion found in rights of free expression. However, democratic persuasion also gives voice to the fundamental value of free and equal citizenship that underlies free speech. The second implication of the book's view is that it can also serve as a model for understanding how to promote ideals of equality in international law without violating the rights of individuals or the rights of states. Indeed, democratic persuasion already has a prominent role in international law.

In this chapter, Joshua E. Weishart notes that courts have resolved lawsuits invoking state constitutional rights in ways that have subdued the tension between two principles of justice: equality and liberty. The equality versus adequacy debate in school funding challenges at first stoked that tension until court decisions gradually demonstrated their potential interrelation. State constitutions, however, do not fix standards for the mutual enforcement of educational equality and adequacy, and thus, courts have struggled with remedies that serve both aims. Weishart contends that reconciliation ultimately must come through reconceptualizing children’s equality and liberty interests as an integral demand for equal liberty, one that treats differently situated children according to their needs so as to cultivate positive freedoms for equal citizenship. A federal right to education can elucidate this demand and facilitate its enforcement, aligning with the newly professed synergy between equal protection and substantive due process.

This chapter examines how the effective end of Jewish life in the Maghreb and Mashreq constituted not only the demise of a distinctive diaspora and a major demographic shift but also the collapse of a political status. For over a millennium, Jews had lived under Islam as an inferior yet protected minority. Equal citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not prove as durable. Most Algerian Jews emigrated with the “repatriate exodus” following independence (1962). The majority of Tunisia's Jews left in the eleven years between independence (1956) and the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War. Morocco had had the largest Jewish community in the Arab world; Jews fled in four waves: 1948–56, 1961–64 with free emigration, 1967, and 1973. Meanwhile, most of Egypt's Jews departed after either the 1948 war (1949–52) or Nasser's nationalist revolution (1956). The majority of Iraq's Jews emigrated in the period 1948–51; many Jews left Turkey in the period 1948–55 and after 1967, yet a substantial number remained. The twentieth century's challenges to the region, especially the rise of exclusionary nationalism during decolonization and afterward as well as its collision with Jewish nationalism, put on full display not just a minority's vulnerability but also the abiding fragility of equal rights.

This chapter explains how in the German—Jewish encounter with political modernity, the contradictory presuppositions constitutive of every nation-state are revealed. Now that the weaknesses of the Westphalian state-system are becoming increasingly apparent, whereas the alternative institutions that ought to transcend this system are still remote, scholars can identify some of these paradoxes more vividly. The dignity of equal citizenship for all and the sovereignty claims of the nation are the dual sources of legitimacy in the modern nation-state, and the tensions among them have accompanied and enframed the people's political experiences since the bourgeois democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The chapter shows how Jewish political and legal thinkers of the twentieth century have grappled with both dimensions of this paradox.

In this chapter, Rachel F. Moran explains that equal educational opportunity is essential to prepare students for civic duties, but significant inequalities inevitably result from sorting students for jobs. In recent years, efficiency has become a driving force behind school reform, one that subordinates equal citizenship to the demands of a global economy. These tensions are most evident in school finance reform as calls for equal education devolve into demands for adequate education. Despite state court victories, disparities in per-pupil resources remain severe, threatening to deprive disadvantaged children of any meaningful opportunity to approximate the accomplishments of their privileged peers. In Moran’s view, reformers must craft a right to education that guarantees every child a fair opportunity to compete. Only then will disadvantaged students have authentic pathways to civic participation and upward mobility, pathways that can make the American dream feel like a real promise rather than a remote possibility.

This chapter addresses the question: If we should treat education as a preconditional right to enable fair deliberative decision-making, what should this right include? Rights claims have become ubiquitous in education reform discourse, but little work to date has focused a philosophical lens on the substantive argument for a right to education, its democratic implications, and what this entitlement should include. This chapter begins with a brief overview of rights theory to call attention to how education is sidelined in existing accounts of welfare rights, and argues why it merits a place alongside the other social goods covered by this literature. The chapter next defends the deliberative view of citizenship as the proper framework in which to situate educational rights, and then turns to its educational demands. The general contours of this right are outlined by focusing on the civic skills associated with meaningfully exercising free speech and voting rights, which illustrate the conditions that facilitate equal citizenship. The chapter focuses in particular on the development of citizens’ cognitive autonomy and ability to use public reason as central to the meaningful exercise of political liberties.

This book offers an account of the rule of law that, though primarily an ideal of procedural fairness, governing the manner in which laws and policies should be applied to particular persons, also has important implications for the permissible content of such laws and policies. The rule of law is explained as a set of closely interrelated principles that together make up the core of the doctrine or theory of constitutionalism, and hence a necessary component of any genuine liberal or constitutional democratic polity. The book argues that the procedural ideal of ‘natural justice’ or due process, if it is to provide real protection against arbitrary power, must be accompanied by the equally fundamental ideal of equality. The latter ideal imposes substantive constraints on governmental power, ensuring equal citizenship. This book discusses the rule of law as a rule of reason, constitutionalism in the United Kingdom and A.V. Dicey's ‘rule of law’, equal citizenship, and constitutional democracy.

The principles of equality and due process lie at the heart of the rule of law, when interpreted as an ideal of constitutionalism, based on each citizen's equal dignity. The meaning of the rule of law cannot be confined to matters of procedure, narrowly interpreted: ‘procedure’ is merely an aspect of ‘process’, whose integrity preserves the fundamental right of equality, or equal citizenship. Since due process supplements fair procedures by insisting on the application, by public officials, of appropriate criteria of decision, it imposes substantive limitations on their power. Legislative and administrative judgments alike must be made within a constitutional framework that identifies, and enforces, explicit and widely acknowledged precepts of justice. Conformity to these precepts ensures a genuine —substantive —equality of all before a law that serves a coherent (if capacious and adaptable) conception of the common good. This chapter discusses administrative justice and constitutional principle, judicial functions and executive agencies, and legislative classifications and the definition of ‘act of attainder’.

Chapter 3 addresses a likely challenge to arguments for a right to education as a matter of equal citizenship: that they are just utopian musings. In response, the chapter focuses on select moments in American history that illustrate that arguments for a right to education have deep roots in our social and legal history. The chapter first considers education proposals from three historical periods during which foundational questions about rights, citizenship, and democratic entitlements were considered at the federal level: the Revolutionary period; Reconstruction; and the New Deal. It then focuses on the landmark Supreme Court case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez(1973), which decided by a narrow 5-4 vote that education is not a right protected by the US Constitution. Although the efforts discussed in this chapter have not led to federal recognition of a right to education, they underscore that the idea is an enduring part of US politics that carries through to the advocacy efforts discussed in the next two chapters.

This chapter discusses the merchant colonies who invited Jewish merchants into their cities on exceptionally propitious terms, constituting the west European region of emancipation. Raison d'état and shifting trade patterns induced governments in such cities as Ancona, Livorno, and Venice to grant Jews extensive privileges of residence and trade, worship, and communal autonomy. In Bordeaux, Jews originally gained privileges as New Christians; over time they emerged as Jews and received confirmation of those privileges. In Livorno and Bordeaux, those privileges entailed virtual parity with Christian merchants. Meanwhile, Hamburg's Senate first attracted a Jewish merchant colony by extending privileges but later, by imposing heavy taxes, drove it away. In Amsterdam and London, which had ceased granting charters to foreign merchant colonies, Jews found themselves in the novel and ambiguous situation of functioning without a charter. They therefore gained rights on an ad hoc basis, becoming members of an emerging civil society. The Jews of Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and London were to make virtually seamless transitions from corporate or civic parity to equal citizenship.

This chapter on “postconflict” Sudan describes the tensions that emerge within the law from the competing demands for equal citizenship and multiculturalism in which law is applied, or not applied, on the basis of the religious or cultural identity of the defendant. The conventional depoliticization of discourse on the rule of law has allowed it to be adopted by those who call into question the very foundation of the rule of law. Barring the unlikely elimination of shari'a in northern Sudan, this chapter asks whether social stability must now be gauged through the negotiation of a system of radical legal pluralism.

This chapter begins to advance the book’s main argument: that we should regard the education that prepares individuals for equal citizenship as a fundamental right that is shielded from majoritarian politics far more than existing practices permit, and far more than most theory recognizes is necessary. Concern for this right is motivated by the worry that leading accounts of democracy often fail to protect the interests of marginalized students. In this and subsequent chapters, arguments about a right to education are located in a deliberative democracy. As education scholars and reformers increasingly look to deliberative ideals to improve the education policy process, it is especially important to consider how well this approach to policy-making serves less advantaged students. The chapter first calls attention to the opportunities and challenges that deliberative theory presents for advancing just education policies. It next shows how leading conceptions of deliberation fail to ensure that all students receive a high quality education due to the wide discretion they give democratic bodies to determine public provisions for education. Finally, it discusses the unique relationship between educational opportunity and political equality, which underscores the need for a right to education that is set above democratic decision-making.

This chapter discusses the moral foundation of public justification for political liberals. Two conceptions of liberal democracies are contrasted together with their distinctive accounts of public justification. It is argued that political liberals view liberal democracies as a shared project among persons with the end of living on terms of mutual respect with others and that this leads to a shared reasons view of public justification. This view is shown to be superior to the convergence account of public justification on the grounds that (1) convergence accounts of public reason fail to capture what is distinctive about democratic decision-making, namely, that it represents a kind of collective willing, and (2) convergence accounts lack normative stability. Political liberalism offers both.