Butler — Yale Law Journal — The critique of rights has evolved to many sets of critiques.55 One description on a website curated by a group of legal theorists who teach or have taught at Harvard Law School summarizes five basic elements:
(1) The discourse of rights is less useful in securing progressive social change than liberal theorists and politicians assume.
(2) Legal rights are in fact indeterminate and incoherent.
(3) The use of rights discourse stunts human imagination and mystifies people about how law really works.
(4) At least as prevailing in American law, the discourse of rights reflects and produces a kind of isolated individualism that hinders social solidarity and genuine human connection.
(5) Rights discourse can actually impede progressive movement for genuine democracy and justice.
Most of the critiques make the claim that rights are indeterminate. The proposition is that “the law is not a fixed and determined system, but rather an unruly miscellany of various, multifaceted, contradictory practices, altering from time to ti