Engines of Liberty

From the national legal director of the ACLU, an essential guidebook on standing up for fundamental civil liberties and resisting executive overreach -- named one of Washington Post's Notable Nonfiction Books of the Year

What role do American citizens have in safeguarding our Constitution and defending liberty? Must we rely on the federal courts, and the Supreme Court above all, to protect our rights? In Engines of Liberty, the esteemed legal scholar David Cole argues that we all have a part to play in the grand civic dramas of our era -- and proposes specific tactics for fighting Donald Trump's policies.

Examining the most successful rights movements of the last thirty years, Cole reveals how groups of ordinary Americans confronting long odds have managed, time and time again, to convince the courts to grant new rights and protect existing ones. Engines of Liberty is a fundamentally new explanation of how our Constitution works and the part citizens play in it.

David Cole is the national legal director of the ACLU, and the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. An award-winning author, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and the legal affairs correspondent for the Nation, he lives in Washington, DC.