Jamal Greene: belief

Transcript context

…But we still have whatever is upstream of the American law, the steep historical and cultural background, so anything we do is going to be flavored by that. We’re not ever going to get to a system where the policemen are like the policemen in Germany, for instance, or that the courts are like the courts in Germany. Given that cultural upstream, again, isn’t the intuition basically correct? Just be suspicious of the law. We should have fewer laws, rely less on the legal process, in essence, deregulate as many different things as we can. Why isn’t that the correct conclusion, rather than building in more rights? Well, I’m skeptical of the cultural premise, or at least I think it requires more specification. I do think that Americans have a history of being paranoid about various things, but this idea that state-building is somehow un-American or something — I just don’t buy it. There was an inflection point — I think an important inflection point — in the 1960s and around the response to the Great Society that one can’t separate from race quite as cleanly as one might wish to, that associates big government with helping out racial minorities in particular, and there was a reaction to that. I am not conceding — I won’t concede at this moment, at least, that we just have to accept that that’s an inevitable feature of the American people, the solution to which is some kind of deregulation. It’s hard for me to draw a line from what I see as the problem to that solution. Say we consider the notion of making disabled people either a protected class or a partially protected class, and you’ve written about this. Aren’t we, in that sense, forcing them much more into the legal system? You have to get a legally valid diagnosis to count as some particular kind of disabled — autistic, ADHD, whatever it may be. Doesn’t that legalistic requirement itself infringe on the rights of many disabled people who may not even think of themselves as disabled or may not wish to be labeled, or they don’t want to get a diagnosis because it will work against them when their divorce case comes up, or for some other reason in the workplace? Isn’t it the case that making it more legalistic is going to infringe on a lot of people’s rights and lead to great harm?…

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