How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

Re:How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights by adrianratnapala on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @01:22AM (#16471463)

This sort of thing is common in well run democratic countries too. European constitutions are full of provisions that say "Such and such a right is inviolable, except when it's not". Or "except when it is violated according to the law".

And it works! That's because (in recent decades) the political reality in Western Europe has been basically in favour of democracy in freedom -- and so they limited basic rights only in corner cases like Holocaust denial. Constitutional texts can help people focus on what is needed for democracy and freedom (and US the Bill of Rights does a good job of this), but what really counts is how people live out the text, rather than the mechanics explicit in the text.

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Re:How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights by nybble41 on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @01:23PM (#16476322)

Still, the fact that these exceptions exist is a clear sign that the authors of the document did not see these as rights at all, but rather revocable privileges. In practical terms, you don't need a written constitution to uphold rights, and having one does not guarantee that rights are upheld—but if you're going to go to the trouble of defining rights in a written constitution, you shouldn't include an insidious "escape hatch" which undermines those rights by claiming that they can legitimately be infringed "for a good cause". Rights, as opposed to privileges, are unconditional and cannot legitimately be infringed under any circumstance.

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