Theories

What do the major legal theories (positive law, natural law, critical legal studies, etc.) say about this right?

Right	Breakout	Contents
Freedom of Association		In Roberts v. US Jaycees, the Supreme Court noted that US jurisprudence has created two constitutionally protected categories of association: expressive (e.g. interest groups and political parties) and intimate (e.g. friends and family). There is little originalism present in key expressive-association rulings. NAACP v. Alabama ( 1959) , the first case where the Supreme Court held that a right to expressive association exists, did not draw on originalism. There is also little originalism present in the intimate-association jurisprudence, though it has been influenced by long-standing common-law ideas. The Supreme court established the idea of intimate association in Roberts, holding that it “has long recognized that, because the Bill of Rights is designed to secure individual liberty, it must afford the formation and preservation of certain kinds of highly personal relationships a substantial measure of sanctuary from unjustified interference by the State.” The majority opinion cites Meyers v. Nebraska ( 1923) , a case that helped establish a right to make individual educational choices. The opinion cites old ideas going beyond education, stating that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a right to “marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Though it does not embrace originalism, the ruling does invoke historical common-law understandings that may have existed when the Constitution was written. As Richard Boyd argues in “The Madisonian Paradox of Free Association,” America’s founders explicitly chose not to include free association in the Bill of Rights. James Madison, the primary author of the Bill of Rights, feared the influence of factions, which private associations furthered. Boyd writes that Madison viewed association as a “second-order” right (Boyd 2008, 258), whose existence is tolerable because institutions can mitigate its worst effects (247). The following passage from “Federalist No. 10” illustrates his attitude toward factions arising from free association: It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency. Boyd suggests several possible reasons why Madison may not have enumerated the right to associate. It is possible that he saw it as implied by other First-Amendment rights, such as free assembly. It also may have been seen as less important or vulnerable than other rights, and Madison may have seen it as the type of auxiliary right protected by the Ninth Amendment. Finally, the right’s exclusion may have been because the founders were too skeptical of it for its inclusion (258). Despite modern views of assembly as related to association, at the time of America’s founding, it would have been better understood as related to the right to petition. According to Congress’s online annotated Constitution, the assembly clause meant that the people have a right to assemble in order to petition the government. The site says that assembly was initially seen as a “subordinate and instrumental” right. The state constitutions mentioned in my original piece on freedom of association should be interpreted the same way. In fact, this is even more clear in these state constitutions than in the national one. The state constitutions surround the right to assemble with expressly political language, such as the right to petition and advocacy for the “common good,” while the First Amendment’s guarantees are political, but not entirely political (it protects religion, and protected speech and press are often, but not always, political). The opinion in NAACP v. Alabama derives freedom of expressive association from a combination of speech, assembly, and the Fourteenth Amendment, not merely freedom of assembly. It states that, “Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association, as this Court has more than once recognized by remarking upon the close nexus between the freedoms of speech and assembly. It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the 'liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech.” References: NAACP v. Alabama: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/357/449 Meyer v. Nebraska: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/262/390 Richard Boyd, “The Madisonian Paradox of Freedom of Association”: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-policy/article/madisonian-parad ox-of-freedom-of-association/ABDB2F9951FD811C0AC84F76327EBACC List of key expressive association rulings: https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/encyclopedia/case/142/expressive-association Congress Annotated Constitution: (“Freedom of Assembly and Petition”)https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1_4_1/#:~:text=First%20Amendm ent%3A,for%20a%20redress%20of%20grievances.
Freedom of Expression		The phrase “living constitutionalism” was first coined in Howard Lee McBain’s 1927 book The Living Constitution (Solum 1256, 2019). Although the theory was only beginning to form, the book provided the foundations of living constitutionalism that we know today: “The following passage illustrates McBain’s notion of a living constitution: ‘A word’, says Mr. Justice Holmes, ‘is the skin of a living thought.’ As applied to a living constitution the expression is particularly apt; for living skin is elastic, expansile, and is constantly being renewed. The constitution of the United States contains only about six thousand word; but millions of words have been written by the courts in elucidation of the ideas these few words encase” (Solum, 2019). Ultimately, the fundamentals of living constitutionalism rely upon the laws of the Constitution being evolutionary, able to change over time, and adaptable to new circumstances and times without the difficult and time-consuming formal amendment process (Strauss, 2010). In a constantly changing world with advancements in technology, changes in international, diplomatic, and social relations, as well as economic evolution, the Constitution does need to be flexible to a certain degree (Strauss, 2010). However, the idea of a Constitution that constantly changes over time cannot entirely be; “The Constitution is supposed to be a rock-solid foundation, the embodiment of our most fundamental principles-that's the whole idea of having a constitution. Public opinion may blow this way and that, but our basic principles-our constitutional principles-must remain constant. Otherwise, why have a Constitution at all? Even worse, a living Constitution is, surely, a manipulable Constitution.” (Strauss, 2010). Scholar James E. Fleming goes on to explain that: “Strauss describes common-law constitutional interpretation as an evolving process of developing precedent and tradition, coupled with judgments of fairness and good policy. So far, so good. But some of his formulations make it sound like judges engaged in this process make judgments of fairness and good policy as if they were simply making pragmatic judgments rooted in concern to develop sensible doctrine, rather than judgments about how best to elaborate the abstract moral and political principles to which the Constitution commits us – or judgments about how best to realize our aspirational principles. He acknowledges this point elsewhere in the book, e.g., where he speaks of common-law courts as relying on “general principles derived from precedents and on its judgments about good policy.” Likewise, he refers to “a living constitution that exists apart from the text and the original understandings – that exists in, for example, the principles that protect freedom of expression and those of Brown v. Board of Education.” In short, we should conceive the Constitution as a framework or scheme of abstract aspirational principles that we elaborate through common-law constitutional interpretation” (Fleming 1178, 2011). Regarding specifically freedom of expression in the First Amendment, the principles of freedom of expression that we know today did not become established in law until over a century after the Constitutions ratification (Strauss 52, 2010). The views of the drafters of the First Amendment drafters is unclear according to the wording of the rights, and even further “There is, in fact, good evidence that the people responsible for adding the First Amendment to the Constitution would have been comfortable with forms of suppression that would be anathema today… The central features of First Amendment law were hammered out in fits and starts, in a series of judicial decision and extrajudicial developments, over the course of the twentieth century” (Strauss 52-53, 2010). The components within the First Amendment that protect the freedom of expression can be broken down into two main categories. First, the 1964 case of New York Times v. Sullivan helped to solidify the protection of the people’s right to criticize the government. The case was the first to place limitations upon the government’s ability to fine individuals who defame public officials (Strauss 53-54, 2010). Then five years later, in Bradenburg v. Ohio, it was decided by the Court that you, as an individual, can exercise your right to freedom of speech and expression by going as far as advocating for violence and/or use of force legally “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action” (Strauss 54, 2010). Along the same vein, in the 1971 case of New York Times co. v. United States, the Court decided that the Pentagon papers (top secret government documents that revealed diplomatic secrets and detailed American involvement in the Vietnam war) were legally published by the New York Times seeing as the publication did not “surely result in direct, immediate, or irreparable damage to our Nation or its people” (Strauss 54, 2010). All these cases came together to underline the fact the people have the right to broad freedom of speech and expression. The government cannot infringe upon this right unless there is clear evidence that suggests other laws will be broken as a result of the exercising of the right; this is a very different image than what the drafters of the First Amendment presumably pictured. Second, within living constitutionalism, under the protection of the right to freedom of expression, there is a hierarchy in terms of which circumstances of exercising the right require the most protection from the Constitution and which the Constitution does not protect at all: “Certain values of low-value speech should receive less or no constitutional protection” (Strauss 55, 2010). Low-value speech, or relatively unimportant speech, includes instances of “obscenity, commercial speech, false and defamatory statements, perjury, blackmail, threats, criminal solicitation…” (Strauss 55, 2010). In lawmaking, laws must not infringe upon one’s rights to freedom of high-value speech, or relatively more important speech such as criticism of the government and public debate. All this is in effect now because of the courts’ interpretations of the Constitution under living constitutionalism. The application of the Constitution now is very different from its first ratification. For example, eventually the Bill of Rights extended to states, but for a hundred years they did not extend to the states, and ultimately, the states were able to restrict freedom of expression freely and legally (Strauss 56, 2010). Also the focus of lawmaking has changed: “When the framers adopted the First Amendment, they were concerned with the balance of power between the federal government and the states and not just about protecting free expression in general. The entire focus of the debate over the First Amendment was on the federal government and on making clear that the Constitution’s grants of various powers to Congress did not include the power to restrict free speech or the press” (Strauss 59, 2010). The states, seeing as they were viewed as much more independent then, and federalism was much weaker, were seeking to protect their territories from an overly-powerful federal government and possible restrictions that could ensue. Ultimately, living constitutionalism has permitted for the practice of freedom of expression that we have today while still trying to maintain the central principles and themes of the American government granted to it by the Constitution. Critical legal theory states that the law is inherently intertwined with social issues, essentially claiming that the law has social biases that maintain the status quo of systemic issues (Legal Information Institute). According to critical legal theorists, the law enables the protection of the privileged few and systemically disadvantages the underrepresented and underprivileged (Legal Information Institute). In “Speaking Respect, Respecting Speech,” lawyer Richard Abel attacks the legitimacy of First Amendment protections: first, by declaring that the line between accepted and prohibited speech is too subjective and, consequently, “rests on sociopolitical needs and judgements” (Gould 763). Secondly, Abel asserts that the marketplace of ideas—the concept that is used to defend free and unfiltered speech—skews in favor of the privileged few (Gould 764). Concurring with Abel’s assessment are Richard Delgado and Jean Stegancic, authors of “Must We Defend Nazis? Hate Speech, Pornography, and the New First Amendment” (Gould 765). They take issue with the view that First Amendment protections are neutral, instead declaring that this jurisprudence is “repeatedly reinforcing the status and views of the governing white, male elite” (Gould 765). While many scholars acknowledge that the judicial system is unintentionally political and, consequently, decides on legal matters, many believe that freedom of expression is an absolute, unwavering statue (Gould 767). Some, like Supreme Court Justice Black, believe that the First Amendment literally: that Congress shall make no law which restricts expression (Gould 767). Others argue that the values which motivated the First Amendment—“self-expression, truth seeking, and self-government—require that its doctrine be permanent and unwavering” (Gould 768). However, Gould points out “that we present cultural and political rationales for the norm of free speech mean[ing] that we determine its importance through social interactions (768). Americans are often proud of their nation’s commitment to free speech; according to US jurisprudence, content-based restrictions on speech are generally unconstitutional unless they directly prevent criminality or public danger. Americans also tend to venerate the founding fathers, learning from a young age that the colonies courageously overthrew the British tyrants. Although free speech is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the unique status that American courts have afforded free expression has little basis in originalism. Rather, such strong free-speech protection is a product of living-constitution theory and America’s modern notions of civil libertarianism. Originalist generally understand the First Amendment’s primary purpose as protecting political speech - not the broad speech protections we observe today. Justice Scalia, who was perhaps the country’s most prominent originalist, wrote the following sentence in his opinion of McConnell v. FEC: “Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, tobacco advertising, dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, and sexually explicit cable programming, would smile with favor upon a law that cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.” Many key free-expression cases, including arguably the two most important in establishing a standard for content-based restrictions, did not draw on originalist thought. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Schenck v. US (1919), which established the clear and present danger test, draws on no founding-era understanding of the Constitution to defend this standard. Ditto for Brandenberg v. Ohio (1969), where the court replaced clear and present danger with the more-stringent imminent lawless action test. Obviously, there have been many other important free-speech cases. Still, the lack of originalist insight on such important cases is telling. Modern free-expression jurisprudence demonstrates more fidelity to living constitution theory than to originalism. As the University of Chicago’s David A. Strauss articulated, “a living Constitution is one that evolves, changes over time, and adapts to new circumstances” (2010). As such, free-speech interpretation can shift to meet the needs of a changing nation According to SMU’s Christopher Wolfe, seditious speech was accepted early in the nation’s history as an exception to the First Amendment because the nation’s stability was not a given then as it is today (2019, 536-7). Today, however, courts can reevaluate anti-government speech in light of the fact that the US is a global superpower. There is even some evidence that the Supreme Court takes public opinion into consideration (Epstein and Martin 1). This might help explain why the court has moved toward broad free-speech protections in a country where free speech is a huge aspect of political culture (although this begs the question of whether causation occurs in the opposite direction). School-speech cases exemplify the different First-Amendment Jurisprudence produced by living-constitution and originalist theory. Justice Thomas issued a strikingly originalist opinion in Morse v. Frederick (2007). Thomas analyzed the history of US public schools, which proliferated in the early 1800s (Thomas 2007, 2). He argues that early public schools “were not places for freewheeling debates or exploration of competing ideas. Rather, teachers instilled ìa core of common valuesî in students and taught them self-control.” He concludes that because students in this area were not seen as having First-Amendment rights, neither are today’s. Meanwhile, in the court’s majority opinion in the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the court cited the following passage from Shelton v. Tucker (1960): “The classroom is peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas.' The Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth 'out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection." Here, it is argued that the First Amendment should protect schools’ current and future function as a breeding ground for ideas, regardless of whether such a function existed early in our nation’s history. References: Wolfe: https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4807&context=smulr Fallone: https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2018/12/on-originalism-and-the-first-amendment/ Dailey: https://open.bu.edu/bitstream/handle/2144/24083/Dailey_bu_0017N_12912.pdf?sequence=5 McConnell v. FEC: ttps://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-1674.ZX.html Schenck v. US: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/249/47 Brandenburg v. Ohio: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/395/444 Strauss: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/living-constitution Epstein and Martin: http://epstein.wustl.edu/research/supctEMPubOp.pdf Morse v. Frederick: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/690/morse-v-frederick Living Originalism and Living Constitutionalism as Moral Readings of the American Constitution, James E. Fleming, 1178, Boston University School of Law, 2011 Boston. Originalism Versus Living Constitutionalism: The Conceptual Structure of the Great Debate, Lawrence B. Solum, 1256, Northwestern University Law Review, 2019 Evanston. The Living Constitution, David Strauss, 52-59, Oxford University Press, 2010 Oxford. The Living Constitution, David Strauss, The University of Chicago Law School, 2010 Chicago.
Freedom of Religion		Originalists disagree on the proper interpretation of the Free-Exercise Clause. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), Justice Scalia, who was one of the legal community’s foremost originalists, issued the opinion of the court, arguing that the clause does not provide for religious exceptions to generally applicable law. In the case, a Native American was fired from his job and denied unemployment benefits for using Peyote, a substance sometimes smoked during religious ceremonies. The court had previously ruled in Sherbert v. Verner (1963) that the First Amendment does provide for that type of exception unless there is a compelling reason to enforce the law anyway (Munoz 1083). As Munoz argues, the Continental Congress’s deliberations may settle this dispute. The Congress considered and rejected a constitutional right not to join state militias for religious reasons, indicating opposition to religious exceptions to general laws (1085). Scalia in Employment Division v. Smith: “We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.” Originalists tend to take a narrow view of the establishment clause. According to Middle Tennessee State University, Scalia believed the clause “only bars official activities that may promote the activities of a particular sect.” He believed the government may, therefore, promote religion over nonreligion, and that government acknowledgment and accommodation is acceptable (Curry and Hudson 2017). In Lee v. Weisman (1992), a prayer-in-schools case, Scalia issued a dissenting opinion in which he argued that whether a practice was acceptable early in the nation’s history should help inform whether or not it violates the Establishment Clause. In this case, he viewed prayer in schools as acceptable in part because of the long tradition of prayer in government-sponsored gatherings. Scalia in Lee v. Weisman: “In holding that the Establishment Clause prohibits invocations and benedictions at public-school graduation ceremonies, the Court—with nary a mention that it is doing so—lays waste a tradition that is as old as public-school graduation ceremonies themselves, and that is a component of an even more longstanding American tradition of nonsectarian prayer to God at public celebrations generally.” In a case from this June, Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue, Justice Thomas went even further, arguing that, “As I have explained in previous cases, at the founding, the Clause served only to ‘protec[t] States, and by extension their citizens, from the imposition of an established religion by the Federal Government”’ (p. 2). REFERENCES: Curry and Hudson:https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1356/antonin-scalia Employment Division v. Smith: https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/364/employment-division-department-of-human-resources-of-oregon-v-smith Espinoza v. Montana: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1195_g314.pdf Lee V. Weisman: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/577/ Muñoz, Vincent Phillip, The Original Meaning of the Free Exercise Clause: The Evidence from the First Congress (2008). Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 1083-1120, 2008, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1150780
Privacy Rights		Positive Law Positive law theory asks if the actions the government actor took would have been unlawful for a nongovernment actor to do in that jurisdiction (Baude & Stern, 2016, 1830, 1831). In other words, what does the written law allow? For instance, the model holds something to be a search if the government uses special legal powers to gain access to information (Baude & Stern, 2016, 1832). This model constrains the ability possessed by police to gain information from private parties while creating a predictable conception of privacy (Baude & Stern, 2016, 1856). Its use in the United States aims to add clarity to privacy expectations that is not had in the Katz test (Baude & Stern, 2016, 1869). Positive law theory was used in California v. Ciraolo and Florida v. Riley (Baude & Stern, 2016, 1867). Natural Law Locke is one of the primary natural law theorists. In his Two Treatises on Government: Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government (Essay Two) he discusses some of these rights which implicitly concern privacy in the State of Nature. In Chapter II: Of the State of Nature, he recognizes in section 6 that the laws of nature prevent “harm[ing] another in his life, health, liberty or possessions” (Locke, 1832, 107). All of these categories can be linked to laws today which protect privacy: mainly constitutional law in various countries, but also, for instance, the United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996). Critical Legal Studies Critical Legal Theorists believe law becomes intertwined with social issues causing each judge to have a somewhat different judgement in each case (Dworkin, 1977, 117). These differing torts and constitutional interpretations create varying implications in jurisdictions based on the weight precedents are given (Dworkin, 1977, 118). Dworkin recognizes that with this connection to social facts, the judiciary plays a bigger role in society (Waldron. 1999, 211). For instance, some judges may find a connection between the directly provided for protection of the right to liberty and implied right to privacy, while others may not (Dworkin, 1977, 117). Roberto Unger supports this example, writing in his essay ‘’Critical Legal Studies Movement’’ that some rights give individuals “a zone of unchecked discretionary action that others … may not invade,” reminiscent of Warren & Brandeis’s original claim to the right to privacy (Unger, 1983, 599). Legal Positivism Legal Positivism claims law depends on social facts, but the existence of law is not dependent on its merits or morals (Sevel & Leiter, 2010). H. L. A. Hart, a famed positivist, claimed that “law should be bound by limits and respect citizen’s privacy” (van der Sloot, 1). Moreover, the state could not and should not regulate private conduct unless there was harm (van der Sloot, 1). Robert Burt claims Hart essentially follows Louis Brandeis’s “right to be let alone” (Burt, 2004, 14). Legal Realism Legal Realism is reading laws “in the light of the purpose and policy of the rule or principle in question” (Macauley, 2005, 371). As such, legal realism expects the law to be constantly changing based on social conditions (Hall, 2005, 452). Calo claims privacy law exemplifies legal realism because of all of the exceptions, shifts with technology, and meanings dependent on other values and rights (Calo, 2019, 34). Despite privacy law’s beginnings being rooted in legal realism, he recognizes that privacy scholars have not expressly used this legal theory (Calo, 2019, 34, 40, 48). United States Constitutional Theorists One would think defining the appearance of privacy rights in the United States Constitution to be easy, especially given the language of ‘penumbras’ used in Griswold v. Connecticut rather than citing one specific clause constitutional (Griswold v. CT, 1965, pars. 14-15). However, Scott Gerber demonstrated in his work Privacy and Constitutional Theory that all six of the constitutional theories of interpretation he presented can be used to find privacy rights in the Constitution (Gerber, 2000; Baker, 2004). Originalists: In his writing, Gerber (2000) posits that if an originalist interpreter wants to find privacy rights in the constitution, they can (167). Generally, those who do find privacy rights in the Constitution cite the Ninth Amendment (Gerber, 2000, 171). This is what Justice Arthur Goldberg cited in his Griswold concurrence and has been cited as such since James Madison wrote the amendment (Gerber, 2000, 171, 172). Living Constitutionalists (US): Living constitutionalists allow for precedents to be called upon. It can be argued this is what was done in Griswold v. CT and other substantive due process decisions on privacy, such as Boyd v. US in 1886 (Gerber, 2000, 178). In the Griswold majority opinion, Justice William Douglas argued that the Supreme Court had previously ruled on cases in which rights were not explicit in the Bill of Rights, but the rights were justifiable to the Court through the First and Fourteenth Amendments (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, par. 11). REFERENCES: Baker, T.E. (2004). Constitutional theory in a nutshell. William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 13(1), 57-123. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1245&context=wmborj Baude, W. & Stern, J.Y. (2016, May). The positive law model of the Fourth Amendment. Harvard Law Review 129(7), 1821-1889. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44072348 Burt, R. (2004). Moral offenses and same sex relations: Revisiting the Hart-Devlin Debate. Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/711/ Calo, R. (2019). Privacy Law’s Indeterminacy. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 20(1), 33-52. https://doi.org/10.1515/til-2019-0001 Dworkin, R. (1977). Taking rights seriously. Harvard University Press. Gerber, S. (2000). Privacy and constitutional theory. Social Philosophy and Policy 17(2), 165-185. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052500002156 Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/381/479 Hall, E.L. (Ed.). (2005). The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Locke, J. (2008). Concerning the true original extent and end of civil government. In R. Hay (Ed.), The Works of John Locke: In 10 volumes (Vol. V). Cosimo Classics. Macaulay, S. (2005). The new versus od legal realism: “Things ain’t what they used to be.” Wisconsin Law Review 2005(2), 365-403. From https://media.law.wisc.edu/s/c_8/tg2md/new_versus.pdf Sevel, M. & Leiter, B. (2010). Legal Positivism. Oxford Bibliographies. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780195396577-0065 van der Sloot, B. (2017). Privacy as secondary rule, or the intrinsic limits of legal orders in the age of Big Data. In M. Dehmer and F. Emmert-Streib (Eds.), Frontiers in Data Science. CRC Press. https://bartvandersloot.com/onewebmedia/Privacy%20as%20secondary%20rule.pdf Unger, R.M. (1983, Jan.). The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Harvard Law Review 96(3), 561-675. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1341032 Waldron, J. (1999) Law and Disagreement. Oxford University Press.
Voting Rights and Suffrage		Natural Law: Perceptions of voting as a right under natural law theory have evolved over time. In early natural law theory, the right to vote was not explicitly considered a necessary component of the fundamental goods on which rights and law are founded. While Aquinas posited that “the supreme power belongs to the multitude as a whole, or to that one who represents the multitude,” he never emphasized the importance of expressing the power of the multitude through voting, specifically (Shepard 1913, 114). Additionally, in the Second Treatise of Government, John Locke finds that, while natural law and reason compel humans beings to create civil governments to protect their property and grant powers to sovereign individuals and institutions as a “common superior on earth to appeal to for relief,” widely-recognized suffrage is not a natural prerequisite for this tendency (Locke 1689, 15). Over time, however, suffrage has received more consideration as intrinsic to natural law. Walter James Shepard describes this shift as part of the “theory of the early constitutional regime,” which moved beyond feudal interpretations of political representation and brought about the notion “that voting is an abstract right, founded in natural law, a consequence of the social compact, and an incident of popular sovereignty” (Shepard 1913, 108). The American Civil Rights Movement also brought about more explicit connections between the right to vote and natural law theory. Martin Luther King Jr., widely considered to have based his political philosophy on the tenets of natural law, often rhetorically framed the right to vote as part of the “eternal moral issue” of the Civil Rights Movement, stating that “the denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition” (King 1957) . King’s commentary on de facto denial of African Americans’ right to vote echoes later writings by King that more explicitly outline the natural law tradition: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” (King 1963). Legal Positivism: Legal positivist interpretations of suffrage prioritize the systems that define, carry out, and protect suffrage and the voting process. Unlike natural law, the right to vote is not intimately connected or not connected to the pursuit of human goodness. Instead, it is a product of positive norms in a given society, and can be codified as a right as long as society and its legislators view it as something worth protecting. According to H.L.A. Hart, the right to vote constitutes a “secondary rule”–a rule that regulates how laws in the conventional sense are “ascertained, introduced, eliminated” and enforced (Hart 1961, 92). Whereas “primary rules” control individual action such as speed limits, environmental regulations, or criminal law, the right to vote as a secondary rule regulates the process by which primary rules are created by incorporating some level of public input on who makes the law. Jeremy Waldron emphasizes the necessity of governmental and legal systems for suffrage, stating that “[o]ne has the right to vote only if one’s vote is counted and given effect in a system of collective decision that determines policy, leadership and authority” (Waldron 1998, 309). While positivists emphasize the importance of systems in the creation and validation of voting rights, voting as a right can also be conferred “as criteria of legal validity” in “conformity with moral principles or substantive values” (Hart 1961, 250). Waldron’s discussion of the inherent connection between individuals and the legal systems that dictate large parts of their lives serves as a positivist articulation of voting as a right: “since it is my duties (among others’) whose performance the state is orchestrating, I have a right to a say in the decision-mechanisms which control their orchestration” (Waldron 1998, 310). Critical Legal Theory: Some critical legal theorists maintain critiques against rights-based legal philosophies and methodologies altogether, including voting rights. These critiques include notions that rights-based legal thought “produces a kind of isolated individualism that hinders social solidarity and genuine human connection,” that “the use of rights discourse stunts human imagination and mystifies people about how law really works,” and that “legal rights are in fact indeterminate and incoherent” (Harvard). Drawing on historical precedent, critical legal theorists such as Robert Gordon argue that overreliance on rights-based legal strategy can make modest social gains for individuals, but simultaneously impose a limit on the extent to which individuals can make use of such rights and push back against entrenched power structures. Similarly, Cass Sunstein in describing the views of this school points to a claim that the right to vote is not meaningfully enforced in the United States due to its strict limitation to the public sector: “The legal system purports to promote democracy through protecting the right to vote and the traditional freedom of expression; but those rights do not allow for democracy in the private sector, where critical decisions are also made. By safeguarding rights in the public arena and ignoring the private sphere, the legal system has eroded rather than promoted democracy” (Sunstein 1983, 128).Under this framework, limiting suffrage to a matter of individual rights imposes unnecessary restrictions on when and where it can be enforced. Not all critical legal theorists agree with the rejection of rights-based frameworks for suffrage. Critical race theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw believe that “rights can be defended and reconstructed; the critique of rights neglects the historical potential of rights in the real lives of people of color and women” (Harvard). Framing voting as a right can also empower marginalized groups and mobilize individuals to push back against the existing legal status quo: “The vast majority are able to sustain a ‘dual consciousness’ – recognizing and capitalizing on the revolutionary potential of legal rights while remaining skeptical of the overall social and political order in which rights are currently embedded” (Harvard). While there is broad consensus in critical legal theory that existing legal systems favor historically dominant hierarchies and do not equally protect all citizens’ ability to vote, there is ongoing debate as to whether framing the issue as a matter of voting “rights” is the best course of action. References: King, Martin Luther, “Give us the Ballot”, 1957, from King, Martin Luther and James Melvin. Washington. A Testament of Hope : the Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986. King, Martin Luther, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, 1963, from King, Martin Luther. Why We Can’t Wait. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010. Hart, H. L. A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus). The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. Harvard University, The Bridge, “Critical Perspectives on Legal Rights”: https://cyber.harvard.edu/bridge/CriticalTheory/rights.htm Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government Shepard, Walter James. “The Theory of the Nature of the Suffrage.” The American Political Science Review 7, no. 1 (1913): 106–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4616998. Sunstein, Cass R. Review of Politics and Adjudication, by Lon Fuller and David Kairys. Ethics 94, no. 1 (1983): 126–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380661. Waldron, Jeremy. “Participation: The Right of Rights.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98 (1998): 307–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4545289.