| In his much-anticipated book, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2021), Jamal Greene ’95 illustrates how our approach to rights is dividing the country. 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. Greene shows how we can build a better system of justice. In this paradigm-shifting account, he 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. |
