The Bill of Rights: A Bicentennial Assessment is a companion volume to the three-volume series commemorating the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. It explores rights in America by re-examining their roots, assessing their effectiveness, and considering their future. Competing conceptions of rights are central to many of the most contentious public issues in the United States, such as free speech and the limits of public expression; affirmative action and the protection of minorities against discrimination; the role of religion and prayer in public schools and other public forums; capital punishment, searches and seizures, and issues affecting rights of the accused; and a host of concerns that have been characterized as personal rights of privacy - abortion, sexual preference, nontraditional forms of human reproduction, and withdrawal from life-sustaining medical technologies.