This edited volume brings together timely and compelling essays by prominent scholars who, for all their differences, agree that “the most important feature of the rights revolution is its dependence on private litigation” (p. 11). However, as the contributors acknowledge, the distinction between public and private civil rights enforcement is fluid. On the one hand, cases are filed less often by public agencies such as the Department of Justice or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and more by private litigators supported by a network of citizen watchdog groups. On the other hand, such private litigation, when it succeeds, builds and strengthens the reach of state power in areas such as employment, housing, and education.

In contrast to previous work on this subject, The Rights Revolution Revisited “moves the focus beyond ... Congress by examining the role of all the branches in the federal government” (p. 13). The contributors, however, do limit themselves to federal cases and thus leave aside the considerable amount of civil rights litigation directed to enforcement of state public accommodation laws and other state antidiscrimination statutes.

When civil rights are taught in a law school course (this reviewer teaches at a law school), the emphasis is largely on the contest over doctrine. Indeed, the contributors to this volume do not ignore doctrine. In fact, a common concern among the authors is that we may well be facing a period of judicial retrenchment in the enforcement of civil rights. However, as the editor Lynda Dodd puts it in her contribution to the volume, titled “The Contours of the Supreme Court’s Civil Rights Counterrevolution,” an exclusive focus on the substance or content of doctrines may obscure the procedural obstacles that courts place on the ability of private plaintiffs to bring their cases in the first place. In “Constraining Aid, Retrenching Access: Legal Services after the Rights Revolution,” Sarah Staszak refers to these procedural changes as “silencing doctrines” and presents a compelling case study of various attempts to lower government funding for the Legal Services Corporation and its services to the poor. Stephen B. Burbank and Sean Farhang distinguish between legislative efforts to thwart the private enforcement of civil rights (largely unsuccessful, dating back to the Reagan administration) and judicial retrenchment (increasingly successful). Burbank and Farhang explain why courts are more able than legislatures to roll back civil rights litigation by claiming that they enjoy more “electoral insulation” (p. 222). This seems an odd factor to emphasize in the current environment.

To be successful, private civil rights litigation needs support from a variety of interest groups and nonprofit organizations. In “Mobilizing Rights at the Agency Level: The First Interpretations of Title VII’s Sex Provision,” Jennifer Woodward emphasizes the crucial mobilizing role played by the National Organization for Women. More surprising is the support agency staff can offer or withhold from private plaintiffs, thus further complicating any easy divide between public and private actors in civil rights enforcement. This is the theme of Quinn Mulroy’s chapter, “Approaches to Enforcing the Rights Revolution: Private Civil Rights Litigation and the American Bureaucracy.” Mulroy compares the different roles played by the EEOC and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Paul Gardner follows up with his own study of EEOC enforcement. He concludes that the incentives for private plaintiffs to pursue employment discrimination are greater than they are for private plaintiffs to bring housing or voting rights cases.

The sheer range of case studies offered in this volume is impressive. Instead of providing a monolithic, one-size-fits-all look at the way private civil rights litigation works, the editor puts together case studies that highlight the differences in enforcement areas. Thus, in addition to topics already mentioned in this review, the book offers Ming Hsu Chen’s careful study of school and workplace protection for language minorities (agency guidance was crucial), R. Shep Melnick’s look at sexual harassment regulations and the role that the Office of Civil Rights plays in enforcing Title IX in an era of judicial retrenchment, and Thomas Burke’s and Jeb Barnes’s examination of enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act (emphasizing that provisions of formal law are socially reconstructed within organizations, thus making “‘law on the books’ quite different from ‘law on the streets’” [p. 189]).

Taken as a whole, the essays collected in this volume offer a valuable corrective to civil rights studies that are narrowly focused on court cases and, frequently even more narrowly, on the few cases the Supreme Court decides. It takes a village and not just a court to make a civil rights state. However, that corrective sometimes needs its own corrections. Let me offer two. First, it matters, for example, whether the existing provisions in Title VII prohibiting “sex” discrimination can and should be construed to already prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, including discrimination against transgender people. There are better or worse arguments on this point, turning among other things on doctrines about statutory interpretation. Even as we pay attention to social forces at work in how civil rights are or are not enforced, we should not lose sight of the legal argument necessary to make this a more perfect union.

Second, not all civil rights law is statutory, which is the focus of this book. There is also the Constitution or, more accurately, constitutions plural: state and federal. Whatever the merits of the arguments for courts to defer to agency interpretations of statutes, those arguments have little force when it comes to constitutional interpretation. Thus, if the civil rights state is to be and remain a constitutional state in the fullest sense, the courts have to be the primary actor. Or at least, they have to be the final actor, if the arguments for the power of judicial review still hold. I offer these suggestions as complementary to the more agency-centered approach in this volume, and certainly not in place of the need for precisely the empirical “law-on-the-street” views of most of the authors collected here.

The book closes with two looks at the future of the rights revolution. David Freeman Engstrom argues for shaping private civil rights litigation so that it better serves public purposes. Aware, however, of the dangers of litigation reform, he leaves us to ponder a basic normative question: What are the public purposes to which private litigation, beyond its usual economic incentives, should be calibrated? The editor Dodd has the final say. Perhaps not surprisingly, she returns to the blurriness of the distinction between public and private actors in civil rights litigation to argue for developing more “synergy” between agencies such as the EEOC, which after all can file its own cases, and private plaintiff-initiated litigation. But she acknowledges that private litigation, for better or worse, is likely to predominate. The task for the next era of the rights revolution, Dodd concludes, paraphrasing the scholar Charles Epp, is to make rights real by mobilizing the resources and public support necessary to secure justice for all.