Jamal Greene: evaluation

Transcript context

…At least as you state the argument in that paragraph, it would seem you’d be sympathetic to a lot more federalism, which could allow for the creation of a lot more rights of intermediate strength, a lot of diversity, pluralistic approaches across different states as, say, we’ve seen with the treatment of COVID. But you don’t seem to go in that direction. Why not? Well, I am sympathetic to federalism. Part of the reason it may be perceived that I don’t go in that direction is because, historically, federalism has been used in large part to defend white supremacy. It doesn’t need to be used in that way, and if we’re not identifying, not recognizing that kind of pathology, I think federalism is entirely compatible with and makes sense in the context of rights. In fact, we sometimes say that rights have to be universal in some sense. I’m not sure why that’s true. I think rights are constantly a subject of contestation, just as governance is constantly a subject of contestation. There might be lessons to be learned from having some flexibility in how we think about those in different institutional contexts and across geographic space. What do you think of the critique made by many supply-side progressives, such as Ezra Klein, that there’s an accretion of too many veto points in our legal system? No one would say that snail darters have absolute rights, but they have some claim to a level of review before you can build something that pushes them out. If you have a lot more — let’s call it non-racist federalism — a lot more intermediate layers of rights, you just accrete more and more reviews, more delays. Things don’t get built. Things don’t happen. We can’t fix global warming as a problem because it takes seven years to get your wind farm approved. Isn’t having a proliferation of the number of rights in the middle actually the problem we face?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.