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Rights And Wrongs, John C.P. Goldberg

Michigan Law Review

If one were to ask an American lawyer or legal scholar for a definition of liberalism, her explanation would likely include mention of constitutional provisions such as the First and Fourth Amendments. This is because liberalism is today understood primarily as a theory of what government officials may not do to citizens. Its most immediate expression in law is thus taken to be those parts of the Bill of Rights that set limits on state action. This tendency to conceive of liberalism exclusively as a theory of rights against government is a twentieth century phenomenon. To be sure, liberalism has …