Your Opinion Please: What are the most Important Rights and Duties to Teach Others?

[Land Shark]

I will be teaching an 8 session class (1 per week) entitled "Know Your Legal Rights and Duties." There are a lot of topics I can teach, so I have to narrow the field.

What do you think are the most important subjects to teach? Answers can be in the field of individual rights or the broader field of public rights.

Thanks for your feedback. Feel free to post links to resources if you wish.

on edit, responding to first reply: This is adult community education, and answers can range from what you personally would like to know or what you think is most important for others to learn about. Thanks.

[enlightenment]

1. Grade level?

What is the context of the course? Philosophy? History? Political Science? Business?

Details would help focus the response! :)

[Land Shark]

3. Adult Education/ Community Education. (I edited OP in response to this) n/t

[enlightenment]

11. Okay.

I would probably start with discussion of the difference (perceived/implied/assumed) between 'rights' and 'duties' (or responsibilities). That seems to confuse many people.

Perhaps follow with a little historical discussion of how those concepts have shifted over time and how religion has influenced how they are perceived. Maybe a bit of discussion of how pre-Christian societies examined the issue (two easy to discuss societies in that sense would be the Babylonians (Hammurabi's code of laws),the Greeks (particularly under Cleisthenes, but later as well) and the Romans (the difference in how the Greeks and Romans defined citizenship is useful in looking at the development of rights/duties).

After that would be a good place to insert the influence (good/bad/indifferent) of religion - and that would pretty naturally lead to the Enlightenment focus on 'man' as a group and as an individual. Rousseau, Hume, Hutcheson, Montesquieu,Locke, and Adam Smith in regard to moral philosophy and the human condition (those bits of Wealth of Nations that everyone ignores).

Maybe one lecture on all that as a foundation?

A few links (the BBC in-depth series is a great, quick overview of many topics, btw!):
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/hamcode.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/greekdemocracy_01.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/romanisation_article_01.shtml#three
http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/enlightenment.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scottish-18th/

[Land Shark]

14. Wow, thanks enlightenment for the enlightenment, the greeks, romans, Hammurabai, etc.! n/t

[enlightenment]

18. Happy to help - if help it was. :)

I always include a couple of lectures on the topic in my history classes - it's great fun. Probably more fun at the level you're teaching it (college kids run the gamete between brilliant and brainless in every class, with the attendant level of discourse; adults who are actively choosing a course like yours are probably really eager and better informed, so the discussion should be fabulous!).

Best of luck!

[kestrel91316]

2. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", and how this

principle crops up in real-life laws and social mores.

[Land Shark]

5. Excellent! I love to teach the foundation of the Golden Rule as a way to understand rights. n/t

[hayu_lol]

6. Rights and Responsibilities as set down in ...

the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

You might explore the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism.

[Land Shark]

9. Good. Except many important rights are not necessarily at all in those documents (inalienable )

For example, the right to privacy, the right to have children, the right to travel or move state to state, right to free thought and conscience, right to be yourself or even "wear strange clothes," and the RIGHT TO VOTE. NONE OF THESE are in the text of the constitution and YET have been recognized for over a century as fundamental rights at the level of the Constitution or higher.

On the right to vote in particular, Amendments to the Constitution reflect NON-DISCRIMINATION in the right to vote, because the right to vote is both state-based as well as higher than the constitution -- it created and ratified and per-existed the Constitution itself. There's an urban legend that Bush v. Gore said there's no constitutional right to vote - not true. They only said there's no self-executing vote FOR PRESIDENT, BUT, the court said in the very next sentence, as soon as a state legislature decides to use elections for the Electoral college, which by the way every state since shortly after the Civil War has, the constitutional right to vote attaches. As a practical matter there is most definitely a cause of action for violation of constitutional rights if a sheriff, for example, detains you on election day to prevent your vote for president.

Some rights, like the right to vote, are properly seen as higher than the Constitution itself and if we affirmatively put the vote in the Constitution it becomes a political football, readily restricted by legislatures of 3/4 of the states or similar vote of Congress. I personally think it's best to keep it open so it doesn't get locked in, in a bad way. Of course, proposals for amendments on this believe they can lock it in via a good way, but with all the voter suppression, who can be so sure?

ON EDIT: IF rights must be in documents to be real, then rights are GRANTED by the government (a very dicey position to be in, freedom-wise, makes Patriot Acts unstoppable even in theory) instead of being GUARANTEED by the government (as set forth in the world's most influential political document ever: the Declaration of Independence, stating, "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men." That's why governments exist: TO SECURE OUR RIGHTS, or guarantee them, NOT TO GRANT THEM.) The exception is minor statutory rights. Where rights are in writing, however, they can be seen as just reductions-to-writing of the pre-existing right. But, are they then fair reflections of the right, or not? What any given right is, or means, will always be contestable.

[rucky]

4. Voting

Jury Duty
Miranda
Reproductive
FOIA
Guns
Immigration
Employment/Workplace
Discrimination

Just picked the most interesting to discuss. :shrug:

[Land Shark]

7. The law of democracy is DEFINITELY in. Applies to all, unlike, say, veteran's rights which are

important, but primarily to those who are veterans. I may teach a breakout group on veterans stuff.

[meegbear]

8. Develop it around the Bill of Rights ...

while the Third Amendment could be "glossed over", the rest certainly cover a lot of territory (off the top of my head):

Freedom of speech / religion / press
Gun ownership
Due Process
State rights and interaction with federal laws
...

And as another person posted ... voting.

[Land Shark]

10. Thanks for those suggestions -- and another vote for VOTING. :) n/t

[Land Shark]

12. kick in case anyone has more ideas re the class starting TONITE. n/t

[ThomWV]

13. The Duty to Speak and the right to remain Silent - and why we have both.

[Land Shark]

16. I say: "The Right to Remain Silent; Is that the ONLY right you wish to Exercise?

[MadHound]

15. How we are quickly losing all of our rights in this country

Some are being taken away, some we the people give away.

Either way, people need to be aware that we are a much less free people than we were even thirty years ago.

[Land Shark]

17. The rights are only OURS, like any valuable thing, they're STOLEN (violated) but not Lost per se.

If they're truly "lost' then we've no right to get them back, because they are not ours.

I understand you to be using the term "lost" in the sense of not operating for us as they should, having "lost utility" as it were due to lack of enforcement, but the frame of "lost" rights is not that good of one because it reinforces a belief that they can't came back or that we've no right to get them back, or that Congress or the Executive or the judiciary somehow has the right to take them away without violating the constitution or inalienable rights. In short, it encourages powerlessness even if it doesn't outright command it.