Making the Bill of Rights Relevant to Young Readers

REBELS, ROBBERS AND RADICALS: The Story of the Bill of Rights, by Teri Kanefield; illustrated by Kelly Malka

Nearly daily, the front page of The New York Times is filled with the clash between an expansive executive branch and the responses of an embattled judiciary. Yet for many young people the most compelling current events are the swells and trends of the digital world. In “Rebels, Robbers and Radicals: The Story of the Bill of Rights,” Teri Kanefield sets out to reveal to those screenagers the architecture of laws and beliefs that undergirds this nation. Can she engage her readers and prove that a 234-year-old document matters to them? Yes.

Kanefield is a lawyer and an accomplished children’s nonfiction author. When her editor suggested a book on the Bill of Rights she found the prospect daunting, until she “hit on the idea of presenting the material the way the law is presented to law students — through actual court cases.” For each of the 10 amendments, she shares individuals’ personal stories and legal conflicts, and shows how they shape or reflect the terms and principles of the amendment.

Kanefield recognizes the “paradox of liberty,” quoting the Lyndon B. Johnson-era assistant attorney general Roger Wilkins on framers who “celebrated freedom while stealing the substance of life from the people they ‘owned.’” Her book looks at the Bill of Rights in the context of real people with complex motives in challenging times.

The Bill of Rights was created to address the founders’ determination to restrain the reach and power of a central government, as well as states’ rights advocates’ demand that such a bill apply only to federal law — leaving states “free to enact any laws they pleased, including laws that allowed enslavement.” Why is it, then, that the rights enshrined in the bill are applied so broadly today? Kanefield describes the shift, after the Civil War, when the expansive 14th Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing “equal protection of the laws” throughout the country. As she demonstrates, this incorporation of the original bill into a national framework was truly a “second founding” of the nation.

From high-concept legal theory, Kanefield moves quickly to the amendments. She approaches the First Amendment and free speech through the Peter Zenger case in colonial New York — when British libel law did not allow truth as a defense. Just as a manager will be thrown out of a baseball game for arguing balls and strikes even if the umpire is indeed blind, Zenger was on trial in 1735 for defaming a corrupt official by printing a newspaper article that said he was corrupt. The local jury ignored the law and took his side — as does the later ratified First Amendment. What, then, are the limits on speech?

We are treated to a sequence of key cases, including the 1965 dispute in which two teenagers were sent home from their Des Moines high school for wearing black armbands decorated with white peace signs in protest of the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court ruled that the teenagers had the right to wear the armbands — but only because the clothing accessory did not “materially and substantially interfere” with the operation of the school. It is easy to picture today’s students engaging in a rich discussion of modern political fashion statements, pressing on the question of what disrupts school life.

One of the best examples focusing on young people relates to the politically contested Second Amendment. We meet Daniel Southwell, who in 2004, at age 13, joined an armed Michigan militia of which his father was a member (and from which Daniel later distanced himself) that saw its purpose as preparing to fight against an oppressive federal government whose gun-control measures it opposed. The Second Amendment refers to “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” and Southwell was explicitly in a militia — but was it “well regulated”? What does that term imply?

Kanefield recounts the history of the amendment from its direct connection to slave patrols through the Bonnie and Clyde gangster era of the 1930s, which inspired some regulation of firearms, to the evolving positions of both the N.R.A. and the national government. She ends again with teenagers: the eloquent resolve of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students such as Emma González and David Hogg to work to change gun laws. If that choice indicates the author’s own leaning, she has earned our trust with her far-reaching legal insight and wide historical knowledge.

Enhanced by Kelly Malka’s full-color images, “Rebels, Robbers and Radicals” is an excellent resource for teachers and librarians from middle school up, especially as we enter the semiquincentennial year of 2026. It also could be useful to a high school moot court or political science club.

It does waver on its intended readership. Words such as “radical,” “labor strike” and “parchment” are glossed; others, such as “originalist” and “litigated,” are not. And while its backmatter contains an extensive bibliography, notably absent is a resource guide aimed at young people. That should be a feature of most nonfiction books for this age group. (There are fine related works to cite, such as Cynthia and Sanford Levinson’s “Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights and the Flaws That Affect Us Today,” available as a graphic novel and supported by a robust website.)

Still, “Rebels, Robbers and Radicals” enables young readers to see the Bill of Rights not as lines in a textbook but as a relevant living document — as what Kanefield calls “the story of us.”

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