An Account of the Democratic Status of Constitutional Rights
(2013) Res Publica : a journal of moral, legal and social philosophy — Vol. 19, n° 3, p. 241-256 (2013)
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- The paper makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, it advances a preliminary account of the conditions that need to obtain for constitutional rights to be democratic. Secondly, in so doing, it defends precommitment-based theories from a criticism raised by Jeremy Waldron-namely, that constitutional rights do not become any more democratic when they are democratically adopted, for the people could adopt undemocratic policies without such policies becoming democratic as a result. The paper shows that the reductio applies to political rights, yet not to non-political rights, such as reproductive, environmental, or privacy rights. The democratic status of the former is process-independent. The latter, by contrast, are democratic precisely when they are adopted by democratic means. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
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Gonzalez Ricoy, I. (2013). An Account of the Democratic Status of Constitutional Rights. Res Publica : a journal of moral, legal and social philosophy, 19(3), 241-256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-013-9219-5 (Original work published 2013)