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Protection of political and social rights

To some extent, all modern governments assume responsibility for protecting the political and social rights of their citizens. The protection of individual rights has taken two principal forms: first, the protection of liberty in the face of governmental oppression; second, the protection of individual rights against hostile majorities and minorities. From the 1960s to the mid-1980s the sphere of public discussion in the Soviet Union was gradually, though erratically, widened. While this widening never extended to the purely political, some of the sociological discussion allowed served to set the intellectual stage for the Gorbachev period of radical reform. Although the Soviet Union suppressed most expression of political opinion until the late 1980s, domination by a central authority protected the basic human rights of some groups from violent rival minorities. On a larger scale, this is also what suppressed many long-standing rivalries in eastern Europe during the Cold War. The degree of repression in the former communist states varied from country to country and changed with time after the death of Stalin.

In the second half of the 20th century in the United States, the Supreme Court expanded the rights of the criminally accused with such cases as Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), in which the Supreme Court ruled that indigent defendants had a right to a court-appointed attorney, and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), in which the court specified a code of conduct for police interrogations of criminal suspects held in custody. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, the national government acted to bar legal discrimination against ethnic minorities, as well as women, people with disabilities, gays and lesbians, and the elderly. Indeed, in the second half of the 20th century, many (but not all) freedoms detailed in the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) were extended. By the early 21st century, however, as the Supreme Court assumed a more conservative orientation, it shifted its focus away from the expansion of minority rights. For example, on issues of race, the Supreme Court ruled in the Bollinger decisions (2003) and in Ricci v. DeStefano (2009) that, while affirmative action policies aiming to provide minority groups with broader employment or educational opportunities could still be used, such policies were not valid if race was the determining factor.

Another type of government regulation bearing on the individual concerns the law of immigration and emigration. The great mass migrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries came to an abrupt halt after 1914 with the proliferation of government controls on the freedom of movement across national boundaries. After some later liberalization, immigration to the industrialized states again saw increased restrictions near the end of the 20th century.