Brennan Center LIVE: How Rights Went Wrong with Jamal Greene

How is it that corporations have the right to spend unlimited sums in our elections, but a Black defendant has no right to a death penalty ruling free of racial bias? Why does a company have the right to sell private prescription data, but marginalized children don’t have the right to an adequate public education?

According to constitutional scholar Jamal Greene, it’s because our courts “flatten textured rights conflicts” into binary, all-or-nothing questions with clear winners and losers. In his new book, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart, Greene argues that courts should reconcile competing rights, not discriminate between them. In a conversation with the Brennan Center’s Alicia Bannon, he’ll discuss how the United States became so “rightsist,” and how we can shift this paradigm to truly ensure justice, once and for all. 

RSVP here.

SPEAKERS

• Jamal Greene, Dwight Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School; Author, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart
• MODERATOR: Alicia Bannon, Managing Director, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice