“The vocabulary of the ‘anointed’ is filled with words reflecting their rejection of incremental trade-offs and advocacy of categorical ‘solutions.’ This is most clear in the law and in writings among the legal intelligentsia, where individual and social trade-offs are transformed into categorical legal ‘rights.’ Ronald Dworkin perhaps best expressed this view when he said: Individual rights are political trumps held by individuals. Just as the smallest trump beats the highest card in any other suit, so these ‘rights’ take precedence over the weightiest other considerations which are not in the form of rights. Thus the ‘rights’ of criminals take precedence over crime control, the ‘right’ to various social ‘entitlements’ takes precedence over the interests of taxpayers, the ‘rights’ of those entitled to compensation for past injustices take precedence over the interests of displaced contemporaries who complain of ‘reverse discrimination,’ and so on. Rights trump interests in this vision.”
rights