A “Charter of Negative Liberties” No Longer: Equal Dignity and the Positive Right to Education
Arijeet Sensharma
In the Spring of 2020, a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Gary B. v. Whitmer penned an opinion recognizing a fundamental right to basic minimum education. While this decision was subsequently vacated pending en banc review and then dismissed as moot following a settlement, it stands as a bellwether of the long-overdue march toward recognition of positive rights under the Constitution. A series of Burger Court opinions attempted to calcify the notion that the Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties,” most famously DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services and its progeny. These opinions erected three key doctrinal barriers to recognition of positive rights: 1) that a cognizable due process claim must arise from direct, de jure state deprivation; 2) that separation of powers points towards legislatures, not courts, as the appropriate bodies for curing social and economic ills; and 3) that furnishing equality is not a proper aim of due process.
But substantive due process doctrine has transformed over the past few decades. Most notably in a series of cases protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals—Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, United States v. Windsor in 2013, and Obergfell v. Hodges in 2015—the doctrines of due process and equal protection have fused so intimately as to have revealed a new doctrinal structure, which Laurence Tribe has termed “equal dignity.” The doctrine of equal dignity has profound implications for the recognition of positive rights. Its theoretical tenets undermine the doctrinal elements which have traditionally steered federal courts away from recognizing positive rights. This Note argues that the case of education—considered in light of the post-Obergefell substantive due process doctrine—dismantles each of the traditional pillars of negative-rights constitutionalism, paving the way for recognition of a positive right to a basic minimum education. More broadly, Gary B. demonstrates that courts are now doctrinally equipped to recognize positive rights within the framework of modern substantive due process, a development that has radical implications for Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence and the project of constitutional equality.
