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CONTEMPORARY ANTI-NATURAL RIGHTS

CONTEMPORARY ANTI-NATURAL RIGHTS The U. S. political and legal system had been based on the Lockean natural rights doctrine. It made the country’s constitutional framework a distinctly individualist system, a revolutionary one at that. The government had been demoted while citizens promoted – their sovereignty came to be identified as unalienable. This was never unchallenged but in time the dominant intellectual current turned against it. So today the most prominent legal minds in America tend to be pragmatic; rights are taken to be grants of government, by such leading jurists as Harvard’s Cass Sunstein (even conservative jurists, such as Chicago’s Richard Posner, disavow the natural rights tradition). Here I dispute the wisdom of this development and urge the re-embrace of the jurisprudence of the Declaration of Independence. Keywords: Locke, constitution, Declaration of Independence, anti-natural rights, government http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice Addleton Academic Publishers

CONTEMPORARY ANTI-NATURAL RIGHTS

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Publisher
Addleton Academic Publishers
Copyright
© 2009 Addleton Academic Publishers
ISSN
1948-9137
eISSN
2162-2752
Publisher site
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Abstract

The U. S. political and legal system had been based on the Lockean natural rights doctrine. It made the country’s constitutional framework a distinctly individualist system, a revolutionary one at that. The government had been demoted while citizens promoted – their sovereignty came to be identified as unalienable. This was never unchallenged but in time the dominant intellectual current turned against it. So today the most prominent legal minds in America tend to be pragmatic; rights are taken to be grants of government, by such leading jurists as Harvard’s Cass Sunstein (even conservative jurists, such as Chicago’s Richard Posner, disavow the natural rights tradition). Here I dispute the wisdom of this development and urge the re-embrace of the jurisprudence of the Declaration of Independence. Keywords: Locke, constitution, Declaration of Independence, anti-natural rights, government

Journal

Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice – Addleton Academic Publishers

Published: Jan 1, 2010

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