How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart
In his new book, Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.
From the publisher:
Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they also are the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting—reducing the law to winners and losers. The resulting system of legal absolutism distorts our law, debases our politics, and exacerbates our differences rather than helping to bridge them.
As renowned legal scholar Jamal Greene argues, we need a different approach—and in How Rights Went Wrong, he proposes one that the Founders would have approved. They preferred to leave rights to legislatures and juries, not judges, he explains. Only because of the Founders’ original sin of racial discrimination—and subsequent missteps by the Supreme Court—did courts gain such outsized power over Americans’ rights. In this paradigm-shifting account, Greene forces readers to rethink the relationship between constitutional law and political dysfunction and shows how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.
On April 29 (5:00 PM Pacific Time/8:00 PM Eastern Time) the Stanford Constitutional Law Center is hosting a Publius Symposium to discuss Greene’s book.
The virtual discussion will include commentary by Nadine Strossen, Jud Campbell, and Geoffrey Siaglet.
Registration is free for this event.
