Glendon

I found Glendon to be a much faster read than anything else we’ve read this semester; at the same time, I really like how she frames rights discourse as part of a larger scheme of individual versus collective and entitlements versus obligations. Those descriptors make intuitive sense to me, so I liked them. However, I suspect that I will continue to like the arguments that she is making as well. With that said, I wonder how she would respond to the concept of solidarity rights that we briefly discussed in Wellman. Would she argue that solidarity rights discourse is equally damaging because it still creates an ingroup and an outgroup, or would she have something different to say about the concept?


I really appreciated Glendon’s extensive discussion of the takings clause. It seems to me that she sets up a paradox dealing with the takings clause. Through writers like Locke and Blackstone, early Americans valued the right to public property as an (almost) absolute right; both writers argued that individuals have nearly exclusive control over their own personal property. In this sense, it seems that private interest in property has the power to trump any common good or community interest in the property. On the other hand, the Constitutional texts that Americans wrote, selected, and popularly ratified as a foundation for their government contains an exclusive exception for government usurpation of individual private property rights. And, she notes that the takings clause was used often in early America. I had read Locke and Blackstone as well as most of the Supreme Court cases that she cited before I read Glendon, but I had never put the puzzle together like that. The way in which she frames the takings clause makes that portion of the Constitution deeply contradictory to me now. I really liked this portion of her argument.