Radical Duke University Law School Professor Jedediah Purdy wants to redefine the U.S. Constitution without constitutional amendments:
progressive candidates and activists are pressing for a new conception of economic citizenship: universal health and family leave, free higher education, access to union membership and other workplace protections against the power of owners and bosses. That would inform a constitutionalism of economic citizenship.How long before judges, who think like Comrade Purdy ,redefine the 14th Amendment to mean you must be a slave to confirm to their visions of rights?
For decades, the Supreme Court has ignored economic power, protecting unlimited campaign spending as a form of speech, undercutting public-sector unions as burdens on the conscience of anti-union employees and upholding “voluntary” arbitration agreements that sign away workers’ protections against abuse and exploitation. The unifying impulse in these opinions is the libertarian conceit that the free market is really free, not shaped by unequal power and vulnerability.
But people aren’t meaningfully free unless they have some security and some option to say no — that is, some power. Judges should protect unions as essential institutions of worker power. They should treat policies like the Medicaid expansion as essential efforts to achieve economic security, treating them as obviously constitutional in the same way that core civic institutions like jury duty are obviously constitutional.
