How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart
Jamal Greene
Mar 2021 · HarperCollins
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An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and how we can build a better system of justice: "Incisive." — Publishers Weekly
Finalist, American Association of Publishers Prose Award
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're also 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.
"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–bestselling author of These Truths: A History of the United States
"A superb stylist [with] an eye for the withering zinger." — The Washington Post Book World
"A provocative argument for more humility and listening, and less arrogance and dogmatism . . . Perfectly timed and passionately presented." —Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens
Finalist, American Association of Publishers Prose Award
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're also 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.
"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–bestselling author of These Truths: A History of the United States
"A superb stylist [with] an eye for the withering zinger." — The Washington Post Book World
"A provocative argument for more humility and listening, and less arrogance and dogmatism . . . Perfectly timed and passionately presented." —Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens
An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and how we can build a better system of justice: "Incisive." — Publishers Weekly
Finalist, American Association of Publishers Prose Award
You have the right to remain silent—and the right to free speech. T...
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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.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has written several books including Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Joe Gould's Teeth, and These Truths: A History of the United States.
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. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Profess...
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