Towards New Perspectives on Drug Control: A Negotiated Settlement to the War on Drugs

The terms of American drug policy are conceived on the model of the current rhetoric of a war on drugs in which victory must be unconditional, namely, no drug use

Human Rights as the Unwritten Constitution: The Problem of Change and Stability in Constitutional Interpretation

We are, I believe, in the midst of a major jurisprudential paradigm shift from the legal realist-legal positivist paradigm of the legal official as a managerial technocrat ideally seeking the utilitarian goal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, to a natural law paradigm of rights. This paradigm shift, most dramatically apparent in legal philosophy in the work of Ronald Dworkin, has not yet been fully and fairly articulated; therefore, we cannot be certain of the final form the paradigm will take or of the extent of its influence on thought about and the practice of law. I believe the paradigm to be of quite general significance throughout all areas of the law, but want here to address its relevance to constitutional law in particular where its importance in enabling us to rethink constitutional law in a more profound way is already being felt. The jurisprudence of rights directly challenges the existing state of constitutional theory and practice in the United States. It sharply repudiates the concessive majoritarianism of James B. Thayer\u27s classic article, the value skepticism of Learned Hand, the jaundiced historicism of Alexander Bickel\u27s later writings, and Herbert Wechsler\u27s appeal to the apolitical and amoral ultimacy of neutral principles. In its place, the jurisprudence of rights takes seriously the fundamental normative concepts of human rights, in terms of which the founders thought and the Constitution was designed, in a way in which later constitutional theory, based on utilitarian legal realist premises, does not and cannot