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The Role Of Individual Substantive Rights In A Constitutional Technocracy, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Abigail R. Moncrieff

This article presents a novel theory of substantive constitutional rights and of the role that they play in an increasingly technocratic legal world. The central descriptive assertion is that substantive rights serve as presumptions in favor of private ordering, which protect a limited set of regulatory regimes from technocratic tinkering, and that the characteristic that defines the set of protected regimes is a high degree of economic and moral uncertainty. Decisions to engage in speech, religion, association, reproduction, and parenting—the decisions that receive substantive constitutional protection under modern doctrine—are decisions that are of unusually uncertain individual and social value. The …