A New Birth of Freedom: Human Rights, Named & Unnamed

by Charles L. Black Jr.

Offers a constitutional argument, based on the Declaration of Independence, the Ninth Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment, for changing the way the government deals with everything from zoning laws to welfare reform in relation to human rights.

Genres: Law, Philosophy, Nonfiction

175 pages, Hardcover

First published June 2, 1997

About the author

Charles Lund Black, Jr. was an American scholar of constitutional law, which he taught as professor of law from 1947 to 1999.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...

Reviews

[Paul]

Charles Black has written a polemic that falls flat in its ambition, which is to change the way that Americans think about what the Declaration of Independence and Constitution actually commit the USA to doing. Instead of a project of individual liberty Black wants it to become a project for human rights, where human rights do not have to respect property and liberty rights. He makes a very poor case that there are a host of human rights embedded (penumbra, anyone?) in the founding documents. What he wants to see, he sees, and where he needs to stretch, he stretches beyond the point of breaking. His basic argument is that if you are poor, perhaps homeless, you have lost your ability to exercise your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He never even makes the simple arguments that clearly refute even a simpleton foundation for such "rights" - e.g. that an American can drive off into the wilderness with his clunker and the clothes on his or her back and find himself at the end of a road with nothing to eat or drink and no home, and claiming a 'right' to housing and an income is of course totally fruitless and pointless, but he still has the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I can see why Black would want to tie his agenda of a wish for human rights to America's founding documents, since they gain some legitimacy in doing so. He fails, however, to connect those dots with law or logic.