2005 Gladys M. Kammerer Award

For best political science publication in 2004 in the field of U.S. national policy.

Award Committee: Evelyn Z. Brodkin, University of Chicago; David Plotke, New School University, Chair: Wendy J. Schiller, Brown University.

Co-Recipient:  Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago

Book: Perilous Times:  Free Speech in Wartime ( W.W. Norton & Company) 

Co-Recipient:  Charles T. Clotfelter, Duke University

Book: After Brown - The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton University Press)

(Geoffrey R. Stone )

Citation: Professor Geoffrey Stone's book Perilous Times is an excellent analysis of the history of limitations on free speech in the United States.  Stone, who is the Harry Kalven Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Law at the University of Chicago, takes the reader across more than 200 years of decision making by Congress, the President, and the judiciary.  Rather than focusing on one branch of policymakers, Stone weaves together the impact of the separate decisions made by members of Congress, the President and the judiciary (from District Courts to the Supreme Court) on the exercise of free speech.  He analyzes both the legal and political dimensions of his subject, in a sequence that allows the reader to gather a much more comprehensive understanding of why free speech has been limited or protected over time. 

Stone details the well known and lesser known cases of challenges to free speech with rigor and sensitivity to historical context.  He takes us from Matthew Lyon who was jailed for sedition under the Alien and Sedition Act to Fred Korematsu who was imprisoned during the Japanese internment during World War II, to the case of the Pentagon Papers.  His work shows the extent to which the Supreme Court's decisions have always been determined partly by the individual views held by the Justices on individual rights as well as by public opinion.  Perilous Times also shows that there is an institutional tendency in the Presidency itself to limit individual expression during wartime.  From Adams to Roosevelt, presidents have veered toward suppressing free speech when it has been viewed to undermine U.S. foreign policy. Professor Geoffrey Stone's work could not be more timely or more important reading for political scientists.  Anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about the pros and cons, and unintended consequences, of limiting dissent in public discourse must read this book.

(Charles T. Clotfelter)

Citation: Charles Clotfelter's study of racial segregation in schools in the United States addresses a durably important issue in American national life.  Of the many works produced around the fiftieth anniversity of Brown this book is especially valuable in combining rigorous empirical inquiry with thoughtful commentary on relevant policy questions.  Clotfelter's careful analysis shows that segregation in schools fell sharply in the decades after Brown, especially but not only in the South.  The steep national decline in segregation did not continue, however.

Clotfelter's diagnosis of what has limited the earlier dynamic of desegregation is provocative for students of modern American politics.  He argues that whites have sought to avoid racially mixed schools, and have employed a range of means to do so; that local governments have sought accommodated white efforts to avoid desegregation; and that national political actors, including the courts, have declined to pursue desegregation vigorously or creatively in recent decades.  Thus political factors have been crucial both in defining the overall course of substantial desegregation and in significantly reducing the extent and dynamism of that historic shift.