AT: “CLS Kritik of Rights” – Indeterminacy Good

AT: “CLS Kritik of Rights” – Indeterminacy Good

Helena Silverstein, Professor, Lafayette College of Government and law, 1996, Unleashing Rights: law, meaning and the animal rights movement, p. 120

“At the very least, the fact that dominant groups and officials voice fidelity to legal symbols, norms, and practices creates practical obligations and standards of accountability that constrain their actions.”

Thus, rights become a constraint on those in power and a tool the marginalized can appropriate to check and challenge oppressive forces.
INDETERMINACY OF RIGHTS ALLOWS ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TO SHAPE ITS OWN IDENTITY

Helena Silverstein, Professor, Lafayette College of Government and law, 1996, Unleashing Rights: law, meaning and the animal rights movement, p. 232

However, animal rights go beyond all of these movements by steering away from the strict emphasis on human rights. The identity of the animal rights is therefore unique. To be sure, this movement, like others, has appropriated and internalized a dominant mode of speaking. As such, its identity has certainly been shaped by the prevalence of rights language and its commonplace meaning. But this movement’s uniqueness suggest that a movement’s identity can resist dominant constructions of meaning. The movement, assuming a rights-oriented identity, has not straightforwardly subscribed to accepted notions of rights. The indeterminate meaning of rights thus provides the movement with space in which to shape its own identity.
INDETERMINACY OF RIGHTS GOOD – MEANS THEY ARE FLEXIBLE ENOUGH TO ENCOMPASS ANIMAL RIGHTS

Helena Silverstein, Professor, Lafayette College of Government and law, 1996, Unleashing Rights: law, meaning and the animal rights movement, p. 78

Finally, all of the previous points about the movement’s deployment of rights language suggest that rights are indeterminate. This in itself is not a novel observation, but most scholars point to the indeterminacy of rights as a critique of the language, asserting that indeterminacy means that rights cannot be relied upon by movements seeking social change. In contrast, the experiences of the animal rights movement offer a different perspective on indeterminacy. Although admittedly indeterminacy poses a problem, it also offers flexibility. As McCann contends,
”It is important to understand that these inherited legal symbols and discourses provide relatively malleable resources that are routinely reconstructed as citizens seek to advance their interests and designs in everyday life. In particular, legal discourses offer a potentially plastic medium both for refiguring the terms of past settlements over legitimate expectations and for expressing aspirations for new terms of entitlement.”

For the animal rights movement, the indeterminacy and resulting malleability of the language has provided the opportunity for meaningful reconstruction.

AT: “CLS Kritik of Rights” – Indeterminacy Good

Unleashing Rights: law, meaning and the animal rights movement, p. 79

Second, I will suggest that the indeterminate nature of rights contributes to the possibility of incorporating alternative values into rights language. As several scholars have suggested, rights are indeterminate. That is, recognizing a right does not determine the future in any significant manner or provide any certainty. It does not establish, in a specific or determinate way, which beings are rights holders, how rights holders will be protected, or what other related rights will be granted. Although scholars have pointed to the indeterminacy of rights as a critique of the language, I will argue that indeterminacy offers flexibility and the potential to advance new conceptions of rights.

By arguing that rights language, as deployed by this movement and reflected in the media, instills new content into the language and, at the same time, maintains its power, I offer an alternative interpretation of rights. This interpretation suggests that the prevailing and traditional meaning of rights, while important in shaping social movement activism, does not straightjacket a movement into a particular set of predominant values. To the contrary, the open, fluid, and indeterminate nature of rights provides social movements with the opportunity to reshape and reconstruct the meaning of the language. Relatedly, I offer in the following chapter a second alternative perspective of rights, arguing that in this social movement activists are not misled by a naïve faith in rights to deploy a counterproductive language. Rather, activists strategically and consciously deploy rights as a result of their critical understanding of the politics of the language. In short, the argument put forth in this and the following chapter suggests that, given the opportunity to redefine the meaning of rights through political and strategic activism, we must reconsider the strategic mobilization of rights in a way that recognizes its potential to advance social change.