Taking Rights Seriously

Rating:
Summary: His Logic is Flawless
Review: ... and this is a welcome breeze in the current political fog of an America drowning in six-shooters and visceral-response-teams. The Dworkin-challenge before us is the discovery of rights as emanating from the individual, and their use in daily life. This is where Dworkin may break down. Unlike Dershowitz's "Shouting Fire", for example, Dworkin does not write as if there is a human behind the logic who is actually extolling our necessary freedoms. Perhaps it is just me, but I'd like to hold on to and celebrate my rights and yours; I'd also like to affect change-- as would Dworkin, on a global scale. Though he sees humanity's natural path to decency, his writing "feels" far too cold to be effective.

Dworkin is provocative, complex and though-full. This work shifts between levels of abstraction and works toward grand theories of natural-law that will flip less talented contemporaries on their collective heads. Because our job as citizens includes the requirement that we think (far beyond our childhood systems of ordering the world), "Taking Rights Seriously" should indeed be taken to heart and mind. My instinct is to suggest that one supplement Dworkin with John S. Mill and Dershowitz. With a nod to Dworkin, I "think" the latter suggestion is well-reasoned.

Rating:
Summary: misleading title
Review: Dworkin provides the best theory of rights I have read. He conceives of rights as inherant in our political systems. Anyone who supports democracy supports rights, he argues. Rather than rights being an external restraint on the 'tyranny of the majority,' as philosophers have long held, they are rather the underpinnings of a one peron-one vote-one value ideal. It is a convincing argument and should take over the concept of rights as natural or God-given.

Whatever abuse our politicians do to our concept of rights, it is never as serious as when we do it ourselves. Dworkin provides a compelling theory for why we should take rights seriously even if we find fallacy in 'natural rights,' which may do.

Rating:
Summary: Tyranny of a minority
Review: Dworkin's thesis is that a tyranny of a minority is better than a tyranny of the majority. His argument is based on rigorous logic. But Justice Holmes observed that, "The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience." Dworkin's theory is similar to those of Plato and Marx. But experience with the latters' theories has been negative. For an analysis of that experience, read Kark Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Rating:
Summary: misleading title
Review: I have only read the first two chapters so far but mostly it is an attempt to discredit Justice John Marshall and his judicial review or judicial activism to cultivate individual rights or protect the common man from an abusive govt and the rich who have bought local and national politicians, with some nonsense about the priority of community or majority rules and principles. How dare the common man protest abuse by the majority!!! So much for freedom and the Bill of Rights. There is some suggestion that may redeem from the prospective that there maybe a better way to challenge injustice of the majority than use of judicial activism, but I haven't got that far yet.