Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte, The Case for Losing Rights (Working paper). Coloquio Nino, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, 15 de octubre de 2023
Envío del trabajo: Oct 15, 2023
This paper argues that under certain conditions, rights—understood as legalistic devices meant to affirm certain core political agreements—fail to preform their function. When this happens, we should revisit our initial decision to check whether we still want to have those rights, whether we need to enforce them more effectively, or whether we would be better off by scrapping them altogether. The paper discusses the conditions that should trigger this reponse from a theoretical standpoint, following the intuition that when rights fail in these ways it is because they are failing to perform the essential legalistic function we expect from them. Counterintuitively, the paper argues that in certain contexts of rights failure we should, indeed, strive to lose rights. The argument is deployed on the case of workers’ rights in Argentina and makes a qualified argument for scrapping them for reasons of equality. It concludes by noting that losing failing legal rights might be the best way to create the political conditions necessary for recovering them, or even expanding them, in a not too distant future.