Rex D. Glensy (Drexel University – Earle Mack School of Law) has posted The Right to Dignity on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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What is “the right to dignity”? Even though the role of human dignity within the framework of legal rules has attracted scholarly attention for some time, it is only relatively recently that courts in the U.S. have shown a similar interest in exploring the existence and extent of dignity rights. Unfortunately, these judicial legal pronouncements that have explicitly or implicitly evoked the idea of a right to dignity have done so in an ad hoc manner and have not explained what the contours of such dignity rights should be. This Article presents four possibilities of what U.S. courts should be intending when they invoke references to the dignity of the person. It notes that each of these possibilities is founded in a very different theoretical understanding of dignity rights. The Article then concludes by exhorting that courts coalesce around one of these possibilities (and offers a suggestion as to which of these it should be) so that a more secure legal foundation can be built for the development of dignity rights in the U.S.