Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Ignores Common Sense and Undermines Social Justice

Ford (The Race Card), a professor at Stanford Law School, seeks to apply a rationalist analysis of the efficacy of a multitude of antidiscrimination laws. Ford builds cogent although not unassailable arguments to conclude that such laws often undermine the rights they were designed to protect and can have unintended consequences that defeat larger social goals. Ford argues, for instance, that laws designed to ensure an adequate education for disabled students divert so many resources that a small number of disabled students receive a "gourmet education" while "others receive a "dog's breakfast." He tackles statutes preventing discrimination against older workers but his final pronouncement is that civil rights laws have been superb vehicles for righting specific cases of direct discrimination, but are "impotent" to cure the legacy of institutionalized social injustice. He offers no silver bullet, but warns that society runs the risk of focusing on the "wrong rights" and may ignore the imperative to correct the "right wrongs." Ford could be characterized as a contrarian debunking accepted wisdom of both the left and right, but all sides can learn much from his thinking. (Oct.)