Rights To and Not To

Authors

Joseph Blocher, Duke Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Keywords

rights, autonomy, government coercion, government restraint

Abstract

When and why should a “right to” include a “right not to”? If a person has a right to engage in an activity or to receive a particular form of procedural protection, under what circumstances should he also have a right not to engage in that activity or to refuse that process? The basic project of this Article is to show why these questions are important in American constitutional law, to explore how doctrine and scholarship have implicitly and sometimes awkwardly dealt with them, and to suggest normative frameworks with which they can be answered.

Citation

Joseph Blocher, Rights To and Not To, 99 California Law Review 761-816 (2012)