The Supreme Court and Dissent: Lessons Learned from Judicial Discourse (Bibliography‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Dissent is a defining characteristic of democratic society. One need only recall how freedom to dissent was denied to student protesters in Beijing's 1989 Tiananmen Square, or to the millions of victims who died in Stalinist gulags because their political or religious convictions were labeled non-compliant with the Soviet dictator's policies for his socialist enterprise. Indeed, American constitutional experts point with satisfaction to the fact that the citizen's capacity to dissent, to proclaim variance with the government's declared positions or practice, underscores the Bill of Rights, the Constitution's first ten Amendments. Those rights originated, so to speak, as the price tag for the Thirteen Colonies' ratification of the Constitution itself. The Constitution's seven articles were regarded as lacking provision to safeguard the right of the ordinary citizen to conscientiously oppose governmental action. The nation's founding citizenry retained acute awareness of how they and their ancestral forebears fared poorly at the hands of autocratic European political regimes. Not so in America, they determined. It was dissent from a tyrannical George III, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence (1776), which enabled the genesis of a distinct American republic. And it was a principle of dissent, as reflected in the aforementioned Bill of Rights (1791), which promised to preserve that republic's integrity of civil attitude, its equity in institutional processes and its resolve to solidify the bases for each person's fundamental liberty. (See McKay, 2000, 47-69.)