Past Blogs

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World Outlook’s Dinner Discussion with Bruce Riedel

By Rebecca Rodriguez

On May 15, 2014, Bruce Riedel, counter-terrorism expert and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, discussed the future of American security at Dartmouth College. The discussion, hosted by World Outlook, allowed students to ask Riedel questions concerning terrorism, intelligence gathering, and future of foreign policy.

Riedel began the discussion with a brief talk regarding American security and its future. America, he believes, has been developing a new foreign policy, much of which is coming from the Republican Party. He predicts that because of these changes the 2016 election will feature a choice not narrow in contours. Riedel emphasized that Americans need to ask themselves what are the nation’s interests and what are we willing to fight for

Riedel then went on to address the issues and the limitations of counter-terrorism. He explained that the biggest misperception surrounding terrorism was that Al Qaeda is or has ever been a monolithic, well-organized, global terrorist organization. Until the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, much of the organization had been driven underground; it is only recently that that the group has again gained strength. Concerning the limitations of counter-terrorism, Riedel has confidence in American capabilities however recognizes that it is particularly difficult to make progress simply because there is little information about many groups and their members. Similarly, attacks planned by few individuals, such as the Boston Marathon bombing, have short gestation periods and are therefore practically impossible to be discovered and prevented.

Concerning the NSA and American intelligence, Riedel acknowledged that the NSA has yet to make a compelling case for what seems to be a superfluous amount of data collection. However, he personally believes more is better in order to protect the nation’s interest. As far as the recent releases of intelligence, Riedel believes that Snowden has had the most impact as he released many methods of intelligence collection. Subsequently there has been a noticeable changed in the behavior of Al Qaeda’s communications. However, he is confident that Snowden will one day be tried and convicted.

Riedel’s following remarks concerning a regime change in Saudi Arabia, the Syrian crisis, and relations with the UAE all relate to the question of American interests. As far as Syria and Saudi Arabia, Riedel emphasized the instability and unpredictable nature of the situations, again leaving the questions up to a matter of American decisiveness. He reiterated that Americans should decide in broader terms what our interests are and where we are willing to get involved.

Bruce Riedel is senior fellow and director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, part of Brookings’ new Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. Riedel also serves as a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

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Peter Singer on Cyber Security, Computation and the Internet

By Ariana Mercado

Peter Singer is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brooking Institution, and gave a presentation at Dartmouth on Monday, May 15th, 2014 on Cybersecurity and Cyberwar. This presentation discussed changes in technology, explained how they affect global security, and gave advice on what an individual can do about the growing issue of cyber security.

​Computation skills touch all aspects of society. Since the first website in 1991, there are currently over 30 trillion websites and 40 trillion emails are sent every year. In the next 5 years, internet enabled devices are estimated to reach 40 billion. All this activity and all these mediums for communication cause 98% of all military operations go through the civilian domain.

With all these amazing advantages to a more interconnected world there remain dangerous disadvantages. Every second, 9 new pieces of malware are discovered. 97% of all Fortune 500 companies admitted to having been hacked, and what Americans are most afraid of is a cyber-attack, with diplomats facing millions of cyber-attacks per day. It is estimated that in the next 10 years the number of cyber-attacks will double. 80 cyber security companies have entered the emerging industry of cyber security with a 10 fold return showing the growing demand for these services.

In addition, cyber security bureaucracies are emerging at both the local and federal level. From last year to this year the amount of times “cyber” was used in the Pentagon’s Annual Budget grew from 12 times to 147 times.

Though cyberwar is an art, 70% of business executives have made cyber security decisions with critically little academic experience in the field. Thus, Peter Singer stressed the importance of a comprehensive, holistic approach to cyber security. Cyber security is everything from the individual level to the organizational level to the global political level. All these different degrees of attacks are lumped together causing gaps in the understanding of the nature of cyber-attacks.

The Internet works on a system on trust. There are three trends to this system: 1. Cybercrime 2. Government actions on monitoring the internet. Pushes by authoritarian regimes in blocking the free flow of information (i.e. China and Russia). What can we do?

  1. Knowledge matters (don’t just leave it to the nerds),
  2. People matter (if you want to set up a response you have to understand the people behind the machines)
  3. Incentives (incentivize a solution to set up standards and regulations)
  4. History matters (prevention is always better than a cure).
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“An Unprecedented Era of a New Tyranny” – Noam Chomsky Responds to Poet John Berger

By Bryan Thomson

On Tuesday, April 22nd, the Gender Research Institute of Dartmouth hosted Booker Prize-winning English poet John Berger and Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor and acclaimed intellectual as part of the ‘Times of Crisis’ lecture series.  Berger first submitted to Dartmouth an enigmatic and poetic recording on the limiting nature of capitalism in modern society, and Chomsky then reflected on what Berger stated.

In his reflection, Berger described what he considers a new type of global tyranny.  In a similar vein as the now-infamous arguments made by Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto and later echoed by Jalal Al-I Ahmad in his 20th century work Occidentosis, Berger sees a distinct divide between an impoverished, exporting East and a greedy, exploitational West. This dichotomous divide between classes and societies creates what Berger labels a worldwide capitalist prison, wherein the walls no longer keep prisoners from escaping, but rather stop the world’s poor from entering the protected lands of the rich. The conspiring powers, no longer governmental, but instead transnational and economic, attempt to dissuade rebellion through empty talk of human rights, growth and democracy, while in reality they desire complacency through passive uncertainty.

Though the capitalist prison presents a massive threat to sustainability and egalitarian living, Berger argues the era is no more unprecedented than any others, since every significant change is ‘unprecedented.’ He ultimately claims that, in order to break the passive acceptance of today’s tyrannical economic oppression, the world’s ‘prisoners’ must find liberty locally, “in the depths of the prison,” and thus break free of the current sedative state of being.

The lauded intellectual, linguist, logician, questionably labeled ‘anarcho-syndicalist libertarian,’ and MIT professor Noam Chomsky skyped in to reflect on Berger’s speech. In his response, Chomsky delved into the various threats to humanity that he argues, do, in fact, make this era unprecedented. Professor Chomsky summarized the state of the global capitalist structure as having, unnoticed and unquestioned, but massive, systemic failures.  The protectionist and universally harmful nature of NAFTA, Alan Greenspan’s claims that worker insecurity is beneficial for the economy and the often exorbitant returns to investors have been the forces driving the world toward collapse.  The systematic NSA surveillance is demonstrative of a government desperate to use security as a means of retaining control, not actually bettering its citizens’ lives. Even environmentally, the elites have only desired quick profits and ignored long-term concerns. Not since the Cretaceous mass extinction event have species been dying so quickly. Global issues of nuclear threat, global climate change and impulsive increases in executive power over democratic debate exacerbate the challenges of the classist struggle the world is undergoing, Chomsky contends.

The proliferation of communication technologies that have saturated virtually every rung of every society in the world now make local issues international. Berger believes our salvation can come through cyberspace – as information is empowering and allows those alive now to “stand shoulder to shoulder with the [wronged] dead.” At the end of his response, Professor Chomsky raised a call for action on the part of student groups and grassroots movements to take on the existing power structure that has allowed so many issues to arise.  Much like the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s or British Suffrage movement, modern challenges demand local and organized action.  Taken in Berger’s global, trans-generational context, Chomsky’s call for action becomes one that demands historical awareness and effective global communication.

Both Berger and Chomsky made clear their opinions that we are truly living in a time of crisis, and that such a time demands effective action.  Whether or not the reader believes in the fundamental evils and reach of a corrupt, transnational Capitalist prison, Chomsky and Berger together create a convincing argument for awareness of global affairs and current issues.  In the 21st century’s age of information, dissemination of opinions, organization of opposition and collective action on socioeconomic and multi-national issues are more feasible than ever before.

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“The Game Changer” – Madeleine Albright on Russia and Crimea, Syria and the Future of US Foreign Policy

By Bryan Thomson

On April 8th, 2014, Secretary of State for the Clinton administration Madeleine Albright met Director of the Dickey Center Ambassador Daniel Benjamin to discuss her experiences in Spaulding Auditorium. After giving a glowing introduction for Secretary of State Albright, the first woman to ever hold the office, Ambassador Benjamin jumped into perhaps the most pressing issue in current global affairs – Crimea.

Secretary Albright described the situation in the Crimean peninsula as a “game changer.”  Despite efforts to cooperate with Putin and Russia after the collapse of the USSR, Russia has become consistently more hostile to America and Europe since the turn of the century. Hostilities recently culminated in the well-publicized seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Secretary Albright, speaking as a Soviet expert, asserted that post-superpower Russia has “psychologically lost its identity” and now disappointingly sees a free Europe as inherently anti-Russian. Accordingly, Secretary Albright contends that the West must be prepared to develop multilateral sanctions to show Putin that use of force over diplomacy isn’t tolerated in the present international system.

When asked about her own involvement in the region, Secretary Albright defended the Clinton administration’s NATO expansion, which many are now calling into question. She cited Article 5 of the NATO treaty – an attack on one member is an attack on all – as a critical deterrent to Russian aggression.  Dismissing claims that NATO acted like a charitable organization, Secretary Albright claimed the organization’s strategic mission has changed since the end of the Cold War. Now, NATO has found allies in many nations previously swallowed unwillingly into the Warsaw pact. Poland, Latvia and others, who have chosen to join NATO have not seen similar violations of their borders as has Ukraine (whose request to join was denied in 2008).

Secretary Albright also made some very straightforward comments regarding Syria. Drawing a parallel to Bosnia, Secretary Albright reminded the audience of the responsibility to protect Syrians.  When asked by an audience member about concrete actions she wished to see the US currently taking, Secretary Albright stated that the US should increase humanitarian and medical assistance to Syrian civilians, especially given the horrific reemerging cases of polio in the region.  She warned that “We are going to be asked why we didn’t do something about Syria. Not 20 years from now, but one year from now.” Unlike the confusing reports and breakneck speed of atrocities in Rwanda, Syria presents an ongoing rights violation that Secretary Albright believes the US should act on immediately.

Secretary Albright, who escaped both fascism and communism in her home country of Czechoslovakia to become one of the most influential and groundbreaking stateswomen in America, elicited a laugh from the audience when she claimed she is “an optimist who worries a lot.” True to her statement, the 90-minute conversation between Secretary Albright and Ambassador Benjamin ultimately proved the former Secretary of State to be cautiously optimistic about America’s future. Drawing on her own work across the aisle with Senator Helms (R-NC), she hopes that current Republicans and Democrats in the center will come together and make progress (or, in her own assured quip, “regain some civility and get some things done!”).  Despite recent inauspicious news, she maintains that a brokered two-state solution is possible in Israel, and that progress with Russia as a partner is still obtainable.  Though Madeleine Albright warned that the challenges of today make those in the ‘90s pale in comparison, her cautious endorsement of both America’s and the world’s capability to progress invites confidence and hope in the future.

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Democracy, the Jewish State, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Conversation with Gershom Gorenberg

By Alexandra Woodruff

On April 3, 2014, Gershom Gorenberg, expert on Middle Eastern politics, discussed the peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians currently mediated by the US Secretary of State John Kerry. The discussion, co-hosted by Dartmouth’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, highlighted issues of occupation and Israel’s identity as concurrently Jewish and democratic.

Gorenberg, a historian as well as a journalist, began the discussion by contextualizing the current peace negotiations by tracing the history of Israel’s development as a nation. After dividing Israel’s history into three eras, beginning with its pre-state history, followed by “the first republic,” and the period of “the accidental empire,” Gorenberg suggested Israel might be on the verge of a fourth era: “a second republic.”

The character of this era, still to come, depends on the success or failure of the current peace negotiations. Gorenberg emphasized that if the current talks were to break down any future negotiations would find both sides worse off. Additionally, he emphasized the importance of the talks and of compromise in continuing Israeli democracy.

Gorenberg also emphasized the importance of narratives in the peace talks, and the significance of the conflict between Israeli narrative and Palestinian narrative. But he also suggested that a “reconciliation of narratives” is not the goal of the current peace negotiations. Instead, it is more important that these narratives do not prevent a successful compromise.

Gorenberg also raised thought-provoking lessons applicable beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When discussing the conflict between Israel as a democratic nation and Israel as a Jewish nation (can it be both at once? Does true commitment to one prevent the other?), he pointed to two important considerations: first, when thinking about global issues and peoples, we have a habit of imposing Western conceptions upon non-western peoples. Specifically, the concept of “Jewish” as distinctly a religion or a race is a Western concept, and thus not particularly meaningful in discussions of identity and democracy in Israel. Second, Gorenberg emphasized that adopting a pessimistic “change can’t happen” perspective is not only politically damaging, but also historically inaccurate.

Gorenberg’s remarks were introduced by the Dartmouth chapter of J-Street U, “a pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-Palestinian group that promotes American diplomatic leadership in achieving a two-state solution as an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

 

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“Imihigo” and Reasons for Successful HIV Management in Rwanda

By Liz Lin

On April 2nd, 2014, Dr. Jean Luc Nkurikiyimfura presented his experience as the Director of the HIV Clinic at Kigali University Teaching Hospital or CHUK (Centre Hospitalier et Universitaire de Kigali), explaining the strong positive trends the country was experiencing with regards to HIV/AIDs management. Specifically, he explains the success with committed leadership, a network of community health workers, and partnerships with international groups.

Rwanda is a small country in central Africa, about the size of New Hampshire with ten times the population. It is also a poor country with a GDP ranked 203 out of 227 countries. Dr. Nkurikiyimfura points out that for a population 11 million, health professionals are scarce: there are only 625 MDs, 8273 RNs, and 240 midwives. Yet, Rwanda has come a long way in providing for its people.

The devastating effects of civil war and genocide in the 1990s, with rates reaching 1 million Tutsi and sympathetic Hutu people slaughtered by Hutu majority in 3 months, can be further quantified by a life expectancy of 28 years in 1994. Dr. Nkurikiyimfura, going back to his home at the end of the decade, recalls the country smelling of death, with corpses still strewn about the land. Since then, the life expectancy has steadily improved to 53 years alongside a 86% reduction of malaria related death. More strikingly, 5-year mortality after birth has decreased from 186 to less than 50 per 100,000 births, not only reaching pre-genocide levels, but also reaching rates lower than the average in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Nkurikiyimfura’s HIV clinic has also had remarkable success in providing access and treatment for HIV/AIDs patients in all aspects from diagnosis, treatment, to follow-through. Prophylactic measures reduced the incidence of HIV vertical transmission, and in 2012 less than 2% of newborns had the virus compared to 11.6% in 2005. With a target demographic of children and adolescents, the clinic also educates for community change from within. Dr. Nkurikiyimfura attributes the success due to the committed leadership, citing the government to be the “least corrupt” compared to surrounding countries and effective in allocation of resources. The community-based focus, with community health workers placing an emphasis on maternal care and child health, and a triage-like system in treatment, builds a strong foundation for public health. Furthermore, community health workers create a network of personal contact to help with treatment adherence through organization of group support and home visits. Finally, the international support, especially from NGOs, is critical.

Some reasons for success may prove to be challenges in the future, speaking to the multi-faceted nature of global health. International support is the least sustainable in the long run, though critical for now. Understandably, with the poverty of the country,Dr. Nkurikiyimfura estimates 80% of the allocated money to fight HIV comes from outside sources. Right now, Rwanda has been justifying the investment, for example, from the Global Fund, with numbers. However, the long term success of combating HIV in Rwanda depends on change from within. Taking communities into context for the treatment of disease is essential: the health care structure must come from the community and not be imposed based on what outsiders might think may work. “Imihigo,” a term defining a pledge to achieve for communal good, is a concept with traditional roots. Dr. Nkurikiyimfura states traditional concepts, including “imihigo,” are key for sustainable development and continued momentum from the Rwandan people

By showing relevance and results through numbers, fighting HIV in Rwanda is a success story. A government committed to forming a strong health care system proves to NGOs and funding sources that it is committed to succeed and builds a partnership of trust in receiving the financial resources needed to effect change. The Rwandan people, pledging “imihigo,” have a strong stake to help themselves and is creating a sustainable network of community health workers and educated citizens.

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Shrier, Dartmouth ’85, Speaks on Coordinated Efforts to Solve World Hunger and Malnutrition

By Tara Basu

On Tuesday, January 28, 2014, Jonathan Shrier, a Dartmouth ’85, Acting Special Representative for Global Food Security at the U.S. Department of State, and Deputy Coordinator for Diplomacy for Feed the Future, spoke to the Dartmouth College community about U.S. and global initiatives in addressing food security. He passionately and lucidly outlined the problem of food security, the forces that threaten it, and the cooperative efforts that are being undertaken to remediate food security issues.

Mr. Shrier began his lecture by informing his audience of statistics regarding poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. According to Mr. Shrier, 842 million people, one out of every eight people, suffer from chronic hunger. 75% of the world’s poor live in developing countries that depend on agriculture for food and economic security. One in four children under the age of five is stunted. Yet 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted. By the year 2050, the world’s population will be greater than nine billion people, which will require an increase of 60% in food production.

However, simply producing more food is not enough, said Mr. Shrier. We face the double burden of malnutrition and a rise in obesity. Nutritious food must be made available to the world population even as global climate change is threatening our food sources. Tropical and sub-tropical regions, such as the Mekong River delta, our primary sources of food, are the most threatened, with sea level increases 20-50% higher than in other regions. As a result, these regions experience acidity and drought.

Mr. Shrier asserted there is a need for cooperation between multilateral organizations, partner countries, civil society, and the private sector. Science and innovation can help address food security issues by transforming production systems and making inputs more effective. The U.S. is a leader in food security issues, playing a primary role in the UN Committee on World Food Security, and it has the research and technology to tackle global hunger. President Obama is a strong advocate for an increase in investments in food and nutrition. At the 2009 G-8 summit in Italy, President Obama announced that the U.S. would increase investments in food. Countries partnered up to invest $22 billion over a three-year period in nineteen focus countries.

Feed the Future has been helping communities become more resilient by equipping them with the technological, research, and scientific tools to approach agriculture more effectively. In the fiscal year 2012, more than 9 million households benefited directly from Feed the Future, and more than 7 million farmers applied new technology through Feed the Future. Focus has been placed on increasing the production of cereals and nutritious legumes. Feed the Future is developing new animal vaccines and pest-resistant crops. One of Feed the Future’s overarching goals is to address nutrition. The World Health Assembly’s goal is to reduce child stunting by 20% by the year 2025. In the 2012 fiscal year, Feed the Future reached more than 12 million children. One Feed the Future project in Zambia focuses on producing orange maize, a source of Vitamin A. Other Vitamin A food products are often too expensive in Zambia, and the orange maize can provide half of the average daily requirement of Vitamin A.

The private sector is helping address food security issues through an increase in resources, innovation, markets, and sustainability. Loan programs in Kenya have been very effective. A loan that costs $125/acre yields $120/acre in profits per year.

In 2012, President Obama revealed the New Alliance, a partnership between African government donors and public and private organizations. Through the New Alliance, more than seventy global organizations have agreed to invest more than $3.7 billion in food security.

U.S. diplomacy is a critical part of the effort to improve food security, said Mr. Shrier. The U.S. is working with countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa. Together with Brazil, the U.S. is addressing food security in Haiti and the Honduras. Promoting open markets is one of the key components of addressing food security.

Mr. Shrier outlined a comprehensive view of the efforts being taken worldwide to address global hunger and malnutrition. He declared food security to be a multidimensional issue requiring a coordinated approach. Currently, the U.S. Government is leading a thorough effort to address global food security. Tackling world hunger and malnutrition generates economic growth and promotes global stability, which is beneficial to all the world’s citizens. The urgent nature of the issue demands a swift response, and Mr. Shrier affirmed that because we can solve the issues of world hunger and malnutrition, we must.

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A World Beyond Race

By Spencer Blair

In his lecture on January 27, acclaimed author and historian Roger Echo-Hawk outlined his vision of “a new kind of discourse about the nature of race in the world.” A citizen of both the United States and the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, Echo-Hawk argued that “we had a non-racial past, so we can have a non-racial future.” Echo-Hawk was joined by a panel of four Dartmouth professors: Allan Covey and Deborah Nichols of the Anthropology Department, and Colin Calloway and Angela Parker of the Native American Studies Department.

Echo-Hawk noted that within the anthropological world, it is generally agreed that race is a social construct with little grounding in biological evidence. In looking to the history of racial constructs as a mechanism for understanding present discourse surrounding race, Echo-Hawk suggested that Europe is the source of the racial identity system. He contended that by characterizing the Irish as sub-human, the British had already established a model of racial superiority before coming to the Americas. This paved the way for the oppression of native populations and Africans that began institutionalized racism in the United States.

According to Echo-Hawk, despite a history rooted in racial superiority, Americans are disinvesting in race so much that the social systems of white supremacy and privilege cannot continue. Like other of Echo-Hawk’s proclamations, this evoked a strong response from Professor Parker. In a response more compelling than those of the other panel members and Echo-Hawk’s own theories, Parker argued that “race is a story that we tell about ourselves” and that “white bonding” is still strong enough to preserve powerful and oppressive racial structures throughout the world. Using Dartmouth as a case study, Parker contended that all members of society are implicated in the “project” of maintaining privilege that rewards those who already have access to the resources needed to succeed.

In accordance with Parker’s model, I disagree with Echo-Hawk that there is much to suggest the imminence of a “non-racial future,” despite the supposed “non-racial past” that Echo-Hawk perceives. Race is too strongly rooted in the events of our past and the identity of our present to disappear from our future. Those in the position of power are heavily invested, no matter how unwittingly, in maintaining the system of privilege. Thus, it is the unfortunate reality that the system of racial superiority will not soon disappear.

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The Pursuit of Happiness

By Ashley Manning

On January 22, the Dickey Center for International Understanding hosted Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who spoke about her recent book The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being. Born in Lima, Peru, Graham attended Princeton University (A.B.), the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (M.A.), and finished her Ph.D. at Oxford University before beginning work with the Brookings Institute in 1988. For the last decade, Graham’s research has focused on “happiness economics.” The Pursuit of Happiness reflects the fruits of this research, as she analyzes “happiness” in econometrics and tentative implications for policymaking.

Graham opened her talk with a pivotal issue: the difficulty of defining happiness and its many different meanings. Eventually, she breaks down the situation by focusing on two types of happiness, contrasting Bentham’s ideas of welfare and hedonic happiness with Aristotle’s idea of happiness as the “opportunity to live a fulfilling life.” Graham first began with a keen focus in Latin America, where she carried out some of the first “happiness” investigations in the continent. However, as her field continued to expand, she became involved in happiness investigations at a global level and encountered a certain consistency in results. Not only did Graham discern certain predominate factors that determine an individual’s or a society’s happiness worldwide, such as health, security, and stable relationships, but that there are correlations between happiness levels and work productivity.

Throughout the presentation Graham noted the limitations of her research, such as cultural barriers and a personality of innate happiness. Similarly, her results also reveal what she describes as the “frustrated achievers” paradox: a tendency for the poorest of society to present higher and more optimist results than the richest. Her overall results indicate that it is seen at a domestic as well as global level, with those living a comfortable economic life presenting higher levels of happiness than those in poverty.

Graham also explained the interdisciplinary nature and growing respectability of this field, which requires the combined efforts of economists and psychologists to understand the phenomena of “happiness.” The field has also resulted in Nobel-prize winning work.

Finally, Graham explored the implication of these discoveries for public policy, since such work has begun to affect policies in the UK. She personally believed in an Aristotelian definition of happiness, due to its greater potential impact in improving the quality of life and opportunities for people in both in developed and developing nations.

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Constitutional Law You Won’t Hear in the Classroom

By Tyler Stoff

James E. Fleming’s lecture on October 31 entitled, “The Myth of Strict Scrutiny for Fundamental Rights,” both explained constitutional law as it relates to fundamental rights and rebutted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s legal philosophy – therefore correcting assumptions about rights and their legal categorizations.

Drawing from his recent book entitled Ordered Liberty, Fleming challenged the notion that some rights as fundamental or absolute, suggesting instead that they be balanced with individual responsibilities and virtues under the law.

Professor Fleming argued that the deep case history concerning rights not enumerated in amendments to the Constitution shows that laws do not fall neatly into demanding the passage of “strict scrutiny” or needing to only express a legitimate state interest to have a “rational basis” to be upheld. This contradicts what many scholars, including those at Dartmouth, have taught regarding the use of the Constitution’s due process clause to establish three levels of rights guaranteed to Americans.

Fleming mainly used the Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court decision of 2003, which struck down a ban of various forms of sexual intimacy, as an example of where the court found that the law did not prohibit a fundamental right. Thus, it did not trigger the “strict scrutiny” assessment, nor did it hold that only a legitimate state interest was necessary to preserve the law. Justice Scalia’s subsequent dissent, attacking the majority opinion for failing to adhere to its supposed prior framework of fundamental rights, superficially supported this liberal view. Fleming claimed this was a deceptive, however, as liberals never suggested this limiting framework themselves. Indeed, the strict, intermediate, and rational scrutiny framework favored in academia is only ever discussed in dissents from major historical cases. The one exception that Fleming did note, however, was the Roe v. Wade decision. This momentous case suspiciously did implicate the failure of abortion restrictions to pass the strict scrutiny of the law required for their constitutionality.

While James Fleming does not endorse a rigid interpretation of rights under the due process clause, he still recognizes them as continuum in line with other aspects of American liberties. “Rights are not absolute trumps,” he stated, arguing that cases like Lawrence v. Texas fit his proposed model rather than the rigid framework Scalia would suggest.