Jamal Greene: belief

Transcript context

…I’m not just saying it doesn’t have to be, but why, clearly, shouldn’t it always be played by lawyers? If I look at antitrust cases, it seems to me a pretty high percentage of justices, historically, don’t understand antitrust very well because they’re not economists, which is fine, not to be held against them. Again, it’s an argument for having people with, say, business experience on the court, people who work with children. I think that’s fair. I wouldn’t want to get too specialized, but there’s a good argument that we’re already too specialized in a technical legal sense. I believe — and I’ve said before in writing — that the court should take what we call social facts or legislative facts into consideration more in their decision-making. They should be more empirical than they are. It makes sense to accompany that kind of call with serious consideration of whether some of them should have other competencies. I think that’s perfectly fair. To turn to your book, How Rights Went Wrong by Jamal Greene. The same arguments can be found in your articles. You argue that the American conception of rights is quite different from that, say, found in Western Europe or, indeed, other parts of the world. What is it, in your opinion, that is upstream of that American difference? Is it that we’re a more ideological nation, and thus, we put a lot more emphasis on a smaller number of rights? What’s the cultural determinant of the difference that you’re pinpointing?…

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