Caroline Kennedy wrote two books on Civil Liberties in the 1990's with her Columbia Law school classmate Ellen Alderman.
I happened to have recently read The Right To Privacy (ISBN: 0-679-41986-1), and I am impressed, and I would like to have more senators who think deeply about our civil liberties and consider their violation, particularly by government officials who are supposed to enforce the laws, to be serious problems.
A brief review/summary of the book follows.
The start off with a group of cases concerning law enforcement:
- The Chicago cases where women with parking violations were strip searched.
- Some cases where travelers in bus stations were questioned by police, and presumably intimidated into consenting to police looking at their bags, where they found illegal drugs
- New Jersey v. TLO which came down to whether a school principal had the right to search a students bags (and the state then prosecute the student as a drug dealer based on the contents of the bags).
Then they get into the cases involving one's bodily privacy.
- The contraception and abortion cases, starting with Griswold.
- Davis v. Davis on frozen Embryos
- A case about doctors delivering a baby by cesarian from a woman who was apparently on the verge of death
- Cases about the very ill who wanted the right to die in comfort and dignity.
Next come some cases exploring the edges of freedom of the press:
- A case where the biological mother is searching for a daughter who she abandoned 17 years earlier
- Cases where the press invades someone's home during an emergency
- A case where a magazine cover used a picture of someone who had nothing to do with the article
Then they look at a couple of peeping tom type cases, including McCall v. Sherwood Inn where some hotel employees secretly observed their guests.
They then go on to work place issues: psychological testing, drug testing, workplace monitoring, and a case where someone lost their job (working for the state of California) specifically due to her sexual orientation.
They try to give you both sides of the issues, but it is pretty clear that the authors are on the progressive side. Some of these are cases that intelligent people might disagree about. I think I agree with them on all of the major points.
This is not a lot to go on, but it gives me some confidence that Ms. Kennedy is a highly intelligent person, who is essentially on my side on some of the most important issues of our time.
Would she be my first choice for senator? Maybe not, but I am not the governor, so I don't have to answer that question.