Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of

Current Affairs magazine, and I am here today with Aziz Huck. He is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago

Law School and the author of the book The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, Available from

Oxford University Press. It is part of their inalienable rights series. Professor Huck,

thank you so much for joining me on

Carter Fares. Thank you for having me, Nathan. Now, people might be familiar with the phrase

there is no right without a remedy. And your book is about, your book is called the collapse

of constitutional remedies. And it is about the fact that in order to

understand what rights we have, we need to look at the process by which the violations of those rights

are remedied. So perhaps we could start with the importance of what happens after you have a right

violated and why you chose to zero in on this question of when a violation occurs, what, in fact,

can one do afterwards to get it remedied?

We're all familiar with the idea of rights as protections against in particular state action.

We're all familiar with the idea that we have some set of entitlements that shield us from state action that intrudes, let's say,

on our privacy, our bodily integrity, or our speech.

And in celebrations of the Constitution, the elements of that document, particularly in the Bill

of Rights that enunciate and describe those rights

are often the focus of public attention.

But what gets much less attention is what happens when those rights are violated or not

respected.

We know that that is, and has long been a serious problem with respect to

government officials who act in self-serving ways, who set aside the limits on their authority,

...