I’m doing a touch of background reading for a post on state constitutions. It occurs to me that several law review articles talk about courts “extending” rights. What does that mean?
It seems to me that “extending” a right is letting a person do something that the federal, state, or local government previous disallowed that person from doing. I understand the meaning on that single-scope level. But I don’t get it in the broader sense. If one person’s “rights” are “extended” (I hate excessive quote marks, so sorry if I’m guilty), isn’t it often so that another person suffers? If one person receives the right to make a bunch of noise, there frequently is a neighbor that loses the appreciation of quiet, right?
This extends to the trade-offs:
- of bodily, individual rights to community moral decisions of whether abortion is murder;
- individual rights to keeping one’s money to the community interest in the greater good (such as paved roads, education for children, and paid police);
- individual rights of expressing a popularly despised belief (say, racism) to the communities desire to clog the collective ear to such rantings; and
- so on
When “rights” are extended, who’s rights are we talking about? I notice some commentators talk about extending individual rights. This makes more sense to me as it clarifies that we’re talking about a person’s right to flick a thumb at the community. And it raises the valid question: to what extent are we cool with that? And further: who’s “we”?
