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

by Jamal Greene, Jill Lepore (Foreword by)

Overview

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PUBLISHERS PROSE AWARD FINALIST | “Essential and fresh and vital . . . It is the argument of this important book that until Americans can reimagine rights, there is no path forward, and there is, especially, no way to get race right. No peace, no justice.”—from the foreword by Jill Lepore, New York Times best-selling author of These Truths: A History of the United States

An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to 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 life, and the right to own a gun.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328518149
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	341
Sales rank:	555,195
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

JAMAL GREENE is Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Hon. John Paul Stevens, he was a reporter for Sports Illustrated from 1999–2002. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Foreword Jill Lepore ix

Introduction xiii

Part I How Rights Became Trumps

1 Getting the Bill of Rights Right 7

2 Rights Meet Race 32

3 Rightsism 58

Part II No Justice, No Peace

4 "Too Much Justice" 91

5 When Rights Collide 114

6 When Rights Divide 140

Part III Rehabilitating Rights

7 Disability 171

8 Affirmative Action 195

9 Campus Speech 221

Conclusion 248

Acknowledgments 252

Notes 255

Index 287

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2021

Columbia Law School professor Greene debuts with a spirited critique of the U.S. judiciary’s “all-or-nothing” approach to deciding conflicts over constitutional rights. According to Greene, the origins of this approach go back to Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s dissenting opinion in the 1905 case New York v. Lochner, which suggested that certain rights were more important than others and should be given “special treatment” by judges. Greene delves into the 1960s civil rights cases that cemented the inviolability of freedom of speech, the right to privacy, and racial equality, among other “fundamental” rights, and laments how these rulings have been interpreted to mean that when one person is found to possess such a right, those with legitimate conflicting interests have no rights at all. Greene argues that “proportionality,” a judicial approach in which courts seek to balance competing claims and craft decisions recognizing diverse interests for the benefit of society, would be better suited to resolving today’s most complex and difficult issues, including gun control, affirmative action, and abortion rights. Greene delves deeply into the legal, cultural, and political matters behind rights conflicts, and laces his account with feisty legal opinions and colorful character sketches. This incisive account persuades. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

“Essential and fresh and vital . . . It is the argument of this important book that until Americans can reimagine rights, there is no path forward, and there is, especially, no way to get race right. No peace, no justice.”—from the foreword by Jill Lepore, New York Times best-selling author of These Truths: A History of the United States   “When Americans talk about rights, we think in absolutist terms: my right prohibits or preempts your action. But as Jamal Greene observes in this deftly argued book, that notion betrays how our rights were originally conceived. Paying special attention to the issues that most vex us, Greene offers an attractive alternative to one of the most troubling aspects of our constitutional jurisprudence.”—Jack Rakove, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution   “Fastidiously researched and immensely readable, How Rights Went Wrong offers important strategies for advancing human rights in an era when the Supreme Court cannot be counted on to do so. Jamal Greene has written a superb, important book—and a well-timed one, in its plea that we not vest so much power in courts, and that we secure fundamental rights through the political process rather than through constitutional litigation.”—Nadine Strossen, past president, American Civil Liberties Union   “A provocative argument for more humility and listening, and less arrogance and dogmatism. Greene urges that we litigate too much and discuss too little—and that ‘rightsism’ is the problem. Perfectly timed and passionately presented, his argument deserves widespread attention.”—Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens “Greene delves deeply into the legal, cultural, and political matters behind rights conflicts, and laces his account with feisty legal opinions and colorful character sketches. This incisive account persuades.”—Publishers Weekly   —

From the Publisher

10/22/2021

Constitutional scholar Greene (Columbia Law Sch.) criticizes the U.S. judiciary's absolutist approach to the exercise of individuals' competing rights. (The conflicts that result when, for instance, one person's right to life clashes with another person's right to bear arms.) He contends that the courts have flattened the texture of Constitutional rights in morally arbitrary ways that widen the gap between law and justice and deepen the nation's polarizing instability. The courts have cast competing rights as questions of who has the right and who doesn't—an either/or binary approach that ignores the multilayered nuances of rights necessary to maintaining civil communities in the 21st century, Greene insists. He focuses particularly on what he calls the U.S. Supreme Court's long history of protecting the "wrong" rights—as in its jurisprudence on race, which often pitted the right to speech (including racist speech) against the right to live free from discrimination. Greene demonstrates how a misguided judiciary has discriminated between or simply minimized constitutional rights, rather than mediating so as to enforce rights on all sides. He urges replacing the current all-or-nothing, winner-take-all mode of settling competing rights, and instead adopting an approach called "proportionality," which he admits is unusual in U.S. legal practice but is increasingly the norm around the world and would also resonate with the Constitution's framers, in his view. Greene's argument to rehabilitate Constitutional rights embraces alternative dispute resolution; he pushes for more mediation, in order to channel conflicts away from courts that he believes are ill suited to the clear-eyed negotiation essential to dealing with structural inequalities and to restoring Americans' relationship to the law and to each other. VERDICT Provocative reading for those interested in legal reform and a civil society.—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Library Journal

2021-01-13
A Columbia Law School professor reframes the framers to show American rights in a new light.

In this provocative, dense assessment, Greene, a former clerk for John Paul Stevens, argues that we have handed over interpretation of the Constitution to the courts, which have veered from the vision of the Founders. Instead of a system in which societal rights are decided by communities and elected representatives, our significant legal disputes are often settled by judges in zero-sum proceedings that rest on interpretations of documents written long before any of the relevant parties were born. The author uses the term “rightsism” to describe a situation in which judges have too much power. Greene advances the pertinent argument that, rather than determine winners and losers, courts should look for middle ways: “Too often,” he writes, “U.S. courts…see their job in constitutional cases as declaring who’s right. The answer, so often, is neither side—or both.” The Constitution seldom contains clear answers to the complex questions of our age. Rather than look back, judges should, as do their counterparts in other countries, scrutinize individual cases with an eye to bringing sides together. “Judges, more than most,” writes Greene, “have the power to make it better, and instead they are making it worse.” Though the author presents a valid argument, the presentation is lacking. He describes a dizzying number of cases and characters, which makes the text overwhelming for lay readers. The first third of the book, which includes an introduction and historical overview, reads like a lecture—e.g., “Rather than concede a significant role for interest balancing or moral deliberation as essential to rights adjudication, [judges] fall back on their narrow professional training.” Greene’s arguments, which may be useful to legal scholars and students, deserve ample airing, but his style doesn’t aid wide comprehension. Jill Lepore provides the foreword.

Intended for general readers but unlikely to register with many non–legal eagles.

Kirkus Reviews