How Rights Went Wrong
Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart
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Narrated by:
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Ryan Vincent Anderson
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By:
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Jamal Greene
About this listen
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PUBLISHERS PROSE AWARD FINALIST | “Essential and fresh and vital . . . It is the argument of this important book that until Americans can reimagine rights, there is no path forward, and there is, especially, no way to get race right. No peace, no justice.”—from the foreword by Jill Lepore, New York Times best-selling author of These Truths: A History of the United States
An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.
You have the right to remain silent—and the right to free speech. The right to worship, and to doubt. The right to be free from discrimination, and to hate. The right to life, and the right to own a gun.
Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they also are the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting—reducing the law to winners and losers. The resulting system of legal absolutism distorts our law, debases our politics, and exacerbates our differences rather than helping to bridge them.
As renowned legal scholar Jamal Greene argues, we need a different approach—and in How Rights Went Wrong, he proposes one that the Founders would have approved. They preferred to leave rights to legislatures and juries, not judges, he explains. Only because of the Founders’ original sin of racial discrimination—and subsequent missteps by the Supreme Court—did courts gain such outsized power over Americans’ rights. In this paradigm-shifting account, Greene forces listeners to rethink the relationship between constitutional law and political dysfunction and shows how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Audiobook read by Ryan Vincent Anderson.
©2021 Jamal Greene (P)2021 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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From war powers to health care, freedom of speech to gun ownership, religious liberty to abortion, practically every aspect of American life is shaped by the Constitution. This vital document, along with its history of political and judicial interpretation, governs our individual lives and the life of our nation. Yet most of us know surprisingly little about the Constitution itself, and are woefully unprepared to think for ourselves about recent developments in its long and storied history.
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The Constitution-A must reading for All Americans
- By Robert on 06-12-15
By: Michael Stokes Paulsen, and others
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The Second Founding
- How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
- By: Eric Foner
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.
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Excellent book - problematic narrator
- By Jennifer on 10-01-19
By: Eric Foner
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Allow Me to Retort
- A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution
- By: Elie Mystal
- Narrated by: Elie Mystal
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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This is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past.
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Informative and Entertaining
- By Kindle Customer on 03-06-22
By: Elie Mystal
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The Reckoning
- Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal
- By: Mary L. Trump PhD
- Narrated by: Mary L. Trump PhD
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The Reckoning will examine America’s national trauma, rooted in our history but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of current events and the Trump administration’s corrupt and immoral policies. Our failure to acknowledge this trauma, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the stress of living in a country we no longer recognize has affected all of us. America is suffering from PTSD - a new leader alone cannot fix us.
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Focus of racism using her uncle as a mirror
- By Amazon Customer on 08-18-21
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Sex and the Constitution
- Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century
- By: Geoffrey R. Stone
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 20 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Constitutional scholar Geoffrey R. Stone traces the evolution of legal and moral codes that have attempted to legislate sexual behavior from the ancient world to America's earliest days to today's fractious political climate. Stone crafts a remarkable narrative in which he shows how agitators, moralists, legislators, and especially the justices of the Supreme Court have historically navigated issues as explosive and divisive as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and contraception.
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Divisive Issues
- By Joanne on 06-28-17
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Making Our Democracy Work
- A Judge’s View
- By: Justice Stephen Breyer
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer delivers an impassioned argument for the proper role of America’s highest judicial body. Examining historic and contemporary decisions by the Court, Breyer highlights the rulings that have bolstered public confidence as well as the missteps that have triggered distrust. What emerges is a unique approach - certain to be admired for years to come - to interpreting the Constitution.
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Timely
- By Don on 05-17-17
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The Conscience of the Constitution
- The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty
- By: Timothy Sandefur
- Narrated by: James Foster
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Timothy Sandefur's insightful book provides a dramatic new challenge to the status quo of constitutional law and argues a vital truth: our Constitution was written not to empower democracy, but to secure liberty. Yet the overemphasis on democracy by today's legal community - rather than the primacy of liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence - has helped expand the scope of government power at the expense of individual rights.
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Liberty!
- By David W. Norman on 05-03-15
By: Timothy Sandefur
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The Constitution Today
- Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era
- By: Akhil Reed Amar
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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When the stories that lead our daily news involve momentous constitutional questions, present-minded journalists and busy citizens cannot always see the stakes clearly. In The Constitution Today, Akhil Reed Amar, America's preeminent constitutional scholar, considers the biggest and most bitterly contested debates of the last two decades. He shows how the Constitution's text, history, and structure are a crucial repository of collective wisdom, providing specific rules and grand themes relevant to every organ of the American body politic.
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Amar is a Brilliant Arguer
- By MJ Schirmer on 11-16-16
By: Akhil Reed Amar
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The Embattled Vote in America
- From the Founding to the Present
- By: Allan J. Lichtman
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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America's political leaders have considered suffrage not a natural right but a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Today, voter identification laws, political gerrymandering, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box. We cannot blame the founders alone for America's embattled vote. Best-selling author Allan Lichtman notes that subsequent generations have failed to establish suffrage as a universal right.
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Old Hat ...
- By Richard D. Parker on 01-17-19
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The Nonsense Factory
- The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System
- By: Bruce Cannon Gibney
- Narrated by: Matt Kugler
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatized "justice". Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past 70 years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy.
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Ruined by obvious bias
- By M. E. Blackman on 10-07-19
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My Own Words
- By: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mary Hartnett, Wendy W. Williams
- Narrated by: Linda Lavin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The first book from Ruth Bader Ginsburg since becoming a Supreme Court Justice in 1993 - a witty, engaging, serious, and playful collection of writings and speeches from the woman who has had a powerful and enduring influence on law, women's rights, and popular culture. My Own Words is a selection of writings and speeches by Justice Ginsburg on wide-ranging topics, including gender equality, the workways of the Supreme Court, being Jewish, law and lawyers in opera, and more.
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Spectacularly Dry
- By CMP on 07-27-18
By: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others
What listeners say about How Rights Went Wrong
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nicolas Pabon
- 07-11-23
A different way to look at rights.
This book gave me a new framework for understanding the nature of today’s hot-button issues. The underlying wisdom: legitimate rights can be in conflict with one another. Adopting this perspective opens the door to de-escalation and thoughtful political compromise.
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- edl830
- 12-29-21
Excellent & Thought Provoking
This is a must read for all who are interested in the law and its application.
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- D.B.
- 08-21-22
A New Take
As someone who has changed his own legal philosophy a couple of time (from natural law to positivism and back again), I can say that Greene’s take is a breath of fresh air. I’m not sure how the profession or the judiciary in particular will take to it, but what is clear is that if his students do, it could have long-lasting, profound and positive consequences on rights’ theory.
Frankly this is a “must read” for students of law as well as for seasoned jurists.
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- Robert
- 10-24-21
Trenchant and valuable
In "How Rights Went Wrong," Jamal Greene offers a critique of American "rights obsession" and suggests that, rather than a few "strong" rights that trump all others, our courts, and our society as a whole, should recognize many more competing rights that must be balanced to serve the requirements of justice. I think he makes a compelling case.
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- Tidsy
- 03-02-23
Good take on the US legal system
I’ve often had a feeling that something was fishy with the US legal system: fights often seemed to be about the wrong thing (Gay cake anyone?). This book gave me a foundation to understand what the problem really is.
I don’t see it being addressed anytime soon, but very much enjoyed the listen.
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- rbassett
- 07-26-22
Garbage
Naive perspective that sees rights as a contest between conservative and progressive perspectives. It makes poor generalizations about both and speaks about it as if there’s some sort of alternative use for the courts in the debate. The premise is stupid.
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- Dana
- 06-13-21
A compelling read but an unconvincing thesis.
Greene writes a compelling narrative, and his thesis is provocative and important. The further one delves into the book, though, the clearer it is that that thesis has collapsed under its own weight. On the one hand, Greene seems to treat “constitutional” as synonymous with “dignifying” or “worthy.” That something be “constitutional” is thus a moral imperative. On the other hand, by treating “constitutional” interpretation as nothing more than a matter of weighing societal values, it is difficult to see the benefit of a “constitution” at all. Perhaps more pressingly, the insistence against drawing bright constitutional lines results in an argument that rests on vague prescriptions (“Courts ought to wrestle with facts!”) and question-begging, extra-textual moralisms (“It is absurd that the Constitution protects X but not Y.”) that are of little help to a court wrestling with a difficult question. We are left with “rights” that are simultaneously everything and nothing, and little real guidance in defining where those rights end and begin.
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