This is something you hear from the left every once in a while. They think they know better than the authors of the U.S. Constitution.The College Fix reports:
Radical law professor advocates ‘redo’ of First and Second AmendmentsThe University of Miami’s Mary Anne Franks is back with her critical/collectivist take on the Constitution, this time advocating a “redo” of the Bill of Rights’ first two amendments.Writing in The Boston Globe, Franks, author of the book “The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech,” says neither the First nor Second Amendment “is a model of clarity or precision,” and that “both are deeply flawed” with regards to free expression and self-defense.The amendments are “highly susceptible to being read in isolation from the Constitution as a whole,” Franks says, as well as their “commitment to equality and the collective good.”
The First and Second Amendments tend to be interpreted in aggressively individualistic ways that ignore the reality of conflict among competing rights. This in turn allows the most powerful members of society to reap the benefits of these constitutional rights at the expense of vulnerable groups. Both amendments would be improved by explicitly situating individual rights within the framework of “domestic tranquility” and the “general welfare” set out in the Constitution’s preamble.
The idea that First Amendment protections are skewed toward powerful individuals is fairly common among radical legal thinkers. Feminist Catharine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan, for instance, believes “free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice.”
“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” MacKinnon wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”
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