Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

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

4.3/5 ( ratings)

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.

Format: Kindle Edition

Release: March 16, 2021

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

4.3/5 ( ratings)

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.

Format: Kindle Edition

Release: March 16, 2021

More books from Jill Lepore

These Truths: A History of the United States

4.4/5 ( ratings)

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

3.6/5 ( ratings)

The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

3.9/5 ( ratings)

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

3.7/5 ( ratings)

This America: The Case for the Nation

Joe Gould's Teeth

3.4/5 ( ratings)

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

3.7/5 ( ratings)

The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death

3.5/5 ( ratings)

The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History

3.8/5 ( ratings)

New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Websterisms: A Collection of Words and Definitions Set Forth by the Founding Father of American English

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

4.1/5 ( ratings)

The Best of 2019

3.3/5 ( ratings)

It's Up to the Women

3.3/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?