Personhood in Citizenship’s Shadow

Crosspost from Balkinization

 

“It has always been easier, it always will be easier, to think of someone as a noncitizen than to decide he is a nonperson.”  – Alexander Bickel

“We asked for workers and people came.”    –Max Frisch

“Under no circumstances can an American citizen be tried in a military commission.” –Senator Lindsay Graham

There is something humiliating about having to argue that your client is a person. And yet, for those of us who represent noncitizens, we are forced to argue personhood all the time. This is true of lawyers representing prisoners at Guantánamo, where dehumanization was both a means and an end, but it is also true in the representation of immigrants in the United States, where the definitional exclusion from citizenship forces us into the realm of personhood. In both instances, even as we argue personhood, we do so in citizenship’s shadow. This is because instead of being independent sources of rights, citizenship and personhood are tethered. As we look toward 2020, we need to consider what citizenship will mean then. I want to suggest that neither constitutional citizenship, as Bruce Ackerman argues for in his chapter and elsewhere, nor personhood, advocated in this volume by Rachel Moran and David Cole, is by itself sufficient to address the inequalities now afflicting noncitizens in the United States. Instead, we might think of personhood as a strategy that, in both success and defeat, leads to a newly imagined American citizenship.    

Constitutional Rights as Human Rights?

Crosspost from Balkinization

A decade ago, lawyers in the United States who worked on cases involving mistreatment of prisoners might have talked about those cases as involving “police brutality.” The lawyers would have described them as falling under the rubric of constitutional litigation involving “civil rights” and “civil liberties.” Today, those same lawyers might describe the same mistreatment of prisoners as “torture” and a violation of “human rights.”

Does the difference in terminology matter, or is this merely a reflection of a “trendy” but superficial globalization? The shift towards the use and consideration of international human rights law by domestic advocacy groups in the United States is a fairly recent phenomenon (though one with historical precursors). As the ACLU’s website explains:

“In 2004, the ACLU created a Human Rights Program (HRP) specifically dedicated to holding the U.S. government accountable to universal human rights principles in addition to rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. HRP is part of a reemerging movement of U.S. based organizations that uses the international human rights framework in domestic rights advocacy.”

Are American constitutional lawyers talking about international human rights the legal equivalent of a pretentious francophilic suburbanite air kissing her friends and declaring the latest sweater at Target to be “très chic”? Is reference to international human rights law a useful strategy for progressive constitutional advocates, or does it simply invite criticism and attack on the grounds that dangerous and undemocratic “foreign” influences are being illegitimately injected into our legal system? Am I calling in the black helicopters here?

Accuse me of having drunk too much of the international human rights Kool-Aid if you wish, but I believe that thoughtful engagement with the broader international human rights movement by progressive constitutional advocates is good for America and good for the world. Why?