In 1991, Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon came out with
Rights Talk, a warning that Americans had embraced a divisive understanding of rights that would lead the country into greater and greater strife. Americans, she argued, tended to regard declaring a right as the solution to any problem—and the more absolute the right, the better. Getting your right honored allowed quick victory, often in court rather than politics; but the wrong people usually won, and even when the right ones did, it left polarization in its wake. America’s most renowned theoretician of rights, the late Ronald Dworkin, had argued that rights are like “trumps” in a card game that make majorities irrelevant, and oblige judges to ignore them. For Glendon, such a political culture distracted from communal life and hard questions, and it was not making things better, but worse.