Comment by qball
4 hours ago
Section 1 is literally just "ignore everything below this section".
If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.
4 hours ago
Section 1 is literally just "ignore everything below this section".
If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.
I think this just highlights that a law, as written, isn't everything.
Say one country has this type of "feel-good document," but it's consistently interpreted by powerful courts as a strong protection, and the government generally leaves people alone due to democratic norms. Another country has a strict and absolute constitution, but courts in practice don't interpret it as such, or people are more frequently harassed when criticising the government. Where would you feel more comfortable speaking your mind, and which document is more useful for protecting freedoms?
I'm not making a specific claim about any real countries, though I would say that freedoms are not strictly worse-protected in Canada than in the US. I'm only stating that a law or other document in and of itself can't protect anything - government and society need to respect it.
Democracy is about more than just elections, and freedom is about more than just laws.
Au contraire, taking rights as if they're defined absolutely means that conflicts between them cannot be resolved equitably, but rather only binary-axiomatically. In this US, this plays out as most natural rights being undermined through inescapable interactions with corpos, with the justification that you've "voluntarily" agreed that you will not exercise your right. There are some exceptions of course (eg Pruneyard v. Robins), but they're more like exceptions that prove the rule.
US courts giving insane leeway to corporations in what a contract can include has nothing to do with whether rights are defined absolutely or not. The exact same scenario could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited.
> could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited
My point revolves around the unlimitedness of the other right that is being used to override the first right in question. A large part of that "insane leeway" is exactly due to the corpos' rights being taken as unlimited/absolute - note how the argument in Pruneyard was trying to use property rights to override free speech rights.
But sure, rather than tweaking the conception of rights, we could instead target reform at reigning in the "rights" of corpos - they are merely whole-cloth creations of government, after all. But I suspect we'd still hit corner cases with sufficient power imbalances between individuals (say a small-time landlord and their tenant, with the landlord attempting to curtail the tenant's speech).