Social Rights

Crosspost from Balkinization

For the past several weeks, I have been puzzling over the nature of the rights that my panel will address at The Constitution in 2020 conference. The panel is entitled “Social Rights”—which echoes the section of the book that I assume we are to discuss. My first instinct was that the panel would be populated with those who have thought a good deal about race, race relations, and racial equality. To my surprise, however, my fellow panelists are people who have thought a good deal about economic issues, labor organizing, and social insurance.  To me, these topics—which are indeed largely the concerns of the “Social Rights and Legislative Constitutionalism” chapters of the book—would more likely come under the rubric of “economic rights.”