How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart

by Jamal Greene

Jill Lepore (Foreword)

An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how the explosion of rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.

You have the right to remain silent and the right to free speech. The right to worship, and to doubt. The right to be free from discrimination, and to hate. The right to marry and to divorce; to have children and to terminate a pregnancy. The right to life, and the right to own a gun.

Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they were an afterthought for the Framers, and early American courts rarely enforced them. Only as a result of the racial strife that exploded during the Civil War--and a series of resulting missteps by the Supreme Court--did rights gain such outsized power. The result is a system of legal absolutism that distorts our law and debases our politics. Over and again, courts have treated rights conflicts as zero-sum games in which awarding rights to one side means denying rights to others. As eminent legal scholar Jamal Greene shows in How Rights Went Wrong, we need to recouple rights with justice--before they tear society apart.

• ISBN13: 9781328518118
• Publish Date: 1 May 2021
• Publish Status: Unknown
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Interesting Yet Ultimately Self-Serving Take On Rights. This book presents as an interesting and novel (at least in an American sense) take on rights - namely, that they are not absolute and should be mediated by government actions. Greene claims that this would ultimately result in less polarization, though he seems to ignore large swaths of what has led to the polarization currently facing America when making such claims. Still, even though blatantly written from a leftist perspective, the book mostly presents its theory in a reasonably well-reasoned approach and thus adds enough to the overall conversation that it should be considered. Ultimately, though, it becomes clear that Greene's entire premise of mediated rights is less a matter of principle or proposing a novel theory or (as he claims) more aligning American jurisprudence with that of much of the rest of the world and much more about defending Big Academia's right to discriminate against the disabled and against certain races, and to control speech in a totalitarian manner. It is this realization - very blatant in the closing chapters, particularly when discussing Affirmative Action and campus speech codes - that ultimately considerably detracts from the overall merit of the proposal, and thus dramatically weakens the entire argument. Recommended.