The 1992 riots in Los Angeles were caused in part by community perceptions of acceptable police conduct in making arrests. The riots sparked the latest round in a national debate about the proper balance between order and liberty in the American system of justice, a debate carried on since colonial times. Bodenhamer examines the defendant's rights in theory and practice and traces their development in courts and other public forums. He deals with the revolutionary heritage, 19th-century democratic individualism, the transition from a rural to an urban society, federalism, and the role of the judiciary in establishing new rights and defining constitutional terms such as due process of laws. Bodenhamer also traces the development of the "due process revolution" wrought by judicial activists of the Warren court who championed the cause of social outcasts and nationalized the Bill of Rights in the 1960s through selective incorporation.
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