Academic

Ringhand Blogs Waldron

By Lawrence Solum

Lori Ringhand has a nice post on Jeremy Waldron's John A. Sibley lecture at the University of Georgia. Here's a taste:

[Waldron] is critical of U.S. style judicial review, preferring the legislative supremacy model traditionally favored by Great Britain and his native New Zealand.

I am increasingly skeptical of part of Waldron's premise - that the Supreme Court is in fact the final definer of rights the U.S. system - but his work nonetheless raises an interesting and troubling point about how we talk about rights. We often use the word ?right? in an absolutist way. But of course none of the rights protected by the Constitution are absolute; rather, they are protected only to the extent that they are not trumped by the needs of society or others.

Check it out!

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 06, 2008 (boomark / email).