Disentangling Symmetries: Speech, Association, Parenthood

Abstract

There must be a reason why the search for symmetry fascinates mathematicians and has been so rich a source of insight for physicists studying not just matter and anti-matter, but the way the universe can be understood as composed of tiny vibrating strings. Perhaps the search for symmetries and the tendency to see them even where they do not actually exist may be hard-wired into the human mind. Whatever the reasons, observers often tend to imagine that certain features of the legal landscape, particularly the landscape of rights, are more symmetrical than they really are.

Ironically, observers similarly tend to overlook the symmetries that are there even when the logic of the legal situation should alert us to their presence. The 1999 Term decisions of the Supreme Court, and the work of the Rehnquist Court generally, provide fresh soil to plow for such symmetries. Thus, the thread, or perhaps string, which unifies the several topics discussed in this essay will be the theme of symmetries and asymmetries, real and imagined, in the constitutional law of rights, sometimes enumerated, but most often unenumerated, as the Court crosses the divide between two millennia.