Zoom Conference Friday: The Future of Rights

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The concept of rights has informed our understanding of the freedom of persons in the context of the power of the state. But our understanding of the content of rights has changed over time. How were rights understood in the past, and how do we understand them in the present? And how can we use our answers to those questions to better inform our understanding of rights in the future? These questions, and others like them, will be addressed at this half-day, online conference, co-hosted by the Liberty & Law Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School and the Sunwater Institute.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

On Zoom, Friday November 18

12:00 noon to 4:30 pm

All times are in Eastern Daylight Time Zone (EDT)

12:00 PM: Opening Remarks

12:10 – 1:20 PM: Panel One – Rights in the Past

Mark Somos: Heisenberg Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany

Ioanna Tourkochoriti: Member of the Law School Faculty at the National University of Ireland, Galway

Moderator: David Bernstein, University Professor and the Executive Director of the Liberty & Law Center at the Antonin Scalia Law School

1:35 – 2:45 PM: Panel Two – Rights in the Present

Prithviraj Datta: Visiting Assistant Professor in the Government Department at Franklin & Marshall College

Ilya Somin: Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Moderator: Joseph Kochanek, External Scholar at the Sunwater Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the George Washington University

3:00 – 4:10 PM: Panel Three – Rights in the Future

Joseph Kochanek: External Scholar at the Sunwater Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the George Washington University

Ani Harutyunyan: Scholar at the Sunwater Institute

Moderator: Matthew Chervenak, Founder and President of the Sunwater Institute

4:10 – 4:30 PM: Closing Remarks

Comments

[Krayt]

Rights should always be understood in the context of the unending chain of weasels over the millenia trying to increase their power.

Weasels with the gift of gab.

[Krayt]

"You don't really have rights. It gets in the way."

"Who told you that?"

"His Lordship."

[Ed Grinberg]

compare:

Long before Covid, the American Civil Liberties Union understood the hazards of creating an emergency state. “The threat of a new pandemic will never subside,” the ACLU wrote in a 2008 white paper on pandemic preparedness. “If we allow the fear associated with a potential outbreak to justify the suspension of liberties in the name of public health, we risk not only undermining our fundamental rights, but alienating the very communities and individuals that are in need of help and thereby fomenting the spread of disease.”
Thirteen years later, in a remarkable about-face, the ACLU positioned universal vaccine mandates as necessary to civil rights: “By inoculating people from the disease’s worst effects, the vaccines offer the promise of restoring to all of us our most basic liberties.” The message comes straight from the new left’s playbook: Your rights aren’t inalienable, they’re conditional on jumping through government-dictated hoops.

source:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-won-over-a-liberal-canadian-midterms-red-wave-democrats-ideals-vote-election-leftist-violence-free-speech-11668197928

[Krayt]

“So this is how Liberty dies, with thunderous applause.”

Having said that, vaccines aren't an evil.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Grinberg — In context, neither comment should be taken to express any general principle. Both were made with an eye to a particular pandemic, AIDS in the first instance, COVID in the second. The interpretations differed because the effects of the pandemics differed.

For useful context, what a general formulation of rights vs. emergency powers requires is a hypothetical pandemic with power to kill a substantial fraction of everyone. That is the situation where emergency is general, and every other liberty is realistically at stake until the emergency has been defeated, or passes on its own.

[Michael P]

"[...] a hypothetical pandemic with power to kill a substantial fraction of everyone."

Early in COVID, a number of leftists argued that is exactly what COVID was, to justify their use of emergency powers. (In some cases, this was just weeks after telling people it was perfectly safe to go out and have a night on the town or a tasty meal in Chinatown.)

[Brett Bellmore]

" In context, neither comment should be taken to express any general principle."

Ah, but they do. The general principle is, "Undermining rights is bad when done by the Right, and good, or at least inconsequential, when done by the Left."

The ACLU has always been about projecting a principled front to protect the left from the right when the right is in power. But now they don't think the right WILL be in power again, and the left doesn't need that protection anymore. So they've changed the way they approach everything.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Bellmore, stop fighting the hypothetical. Accept the premise, which is not only realistic, but nearly certain given time.

There will someday be a pandemic which threatens to kill a substantial fraction of everyone. In that instance, do you oppose emergency powers to deal with anti-government agitators too stupid to lock down, get vaccinated, wear masks, get tested, quarantine, or do whatever else is required to prevent mass catastrophe?

Or do you intend to be one of those, who try to thwart government and bring on mass catastrophe? How committed are you to ideology as a response to problems ideology cannot possibly address? Do you even acknowledge a need for an empirical overview, to determine whether an event is more like a political disagreement, or more like a killer asteroid?

[Brett Bellmore]

There WILL eventually be a pandemic that threatens to kill a substantial fraction of the population, even if Covid wasn't such a pandemic. I agree this IS eventually going to happen.

But, what does this imply?

If such a threat allows civil liberties to be curtailed, then it follows as night follows day that pretextual claims of such threats will be deployed as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, and make other policy changes they'd wanted for other reasons, and couldn't ram through in normal times. Some people would say, and not entirely without justification, that Covid was used that way. The Democrats profited mightily this election from election law changes pushed through with Covid as an excuse.

And, even setting aside the cost of those actions taken pretextually, the "Boy who cried wolf" effect will set in, and when your genuinely serious plague arrives, people won't take it seriously.

There are a number of preparations we can make in advance, policy change we could do now, to better position ourselves in the event of such a plague, without enabling those downsides. Push medical progress forward, clear out of the way regulatory obstacles to rolling out new medical tech. Change building codes to encourage better indoor air filtration, use of bio-safe UV-C sterilization and self-sterilizing contact surfaces. Start routinely collecting and sequencing aerosol samples in public places. Covid tracking through sewage was a success, why not deploy it routinely to watch for new pathogens showing up?

But the measures deployed in the event such a pathogen shows up can be horribly destructive, to civil liberties, to the economy. Those measures need to be locked away, accessible only when a political consensus that an emergency has arrived exists.

Emergency powers should require supermajority votes to invoke, and be severely sunsetted. To the extent we can safely allow them to exist at all.

[SRG]

Past fiction, present fiction, future fiction.

[Stephen Lathrop]

How were rights understood in the past, and how do we understand them in the present? And how can we use our answers to those questions to better inform our understanding of rights in the future?

That part about past understanding is going to require a historian or two. Got any on your panel?

[Stephen Lathrop]

Sunwater’s nonpartisan, empirically based, scholarly approach to exploring fundamental ideas incorporates disciplines as diverse as law, economics, political science, business, data science, sociobiology, human evolution, and neuroscience.

Not history, I see.

Sunwater Institute, funded by who?

[Commenter_XY]

Professor Bernstein, will this be posted afterwards? Can't make the conference, but would love to view it afterwards. Looks like a great discussion ahead. Best of luck!