A Constitutional Right to a Universal Basic Income

Abstract

This article explains how a legal argument for a constitutional right to a universal basic income (UBI) in the United States could be constructed. My aim is to move the idea of a constitutionally-required UBI from the implausible to the plausible, suggesting that it is less far-fetched than it may initially appear to be. In Dworkinian terminology, everyone is entitled to equal concern and respect under the Constitution. Judges can read its abstract language morally when they decide real constitutional cases to make the country more just. In egalitarian liberalism, the quality of a person’s life must not depend on financial circumstances that are mostly beyond her control and the government must protect the most vulnerable members of society from financial insecurity to enhance their personal autonomy. I reduce the sharp distinction between positive and negative rights in contemporary constitutional doctrine by elaborating on how the U.S. Constitution, and the case law that has glossed it over time, can establish a constitutional right to a UBI. A constitutional right to a UBI is morally justified and constitutionally possible; it is only implausible inasmuch as the timing is far from ideal.

Keywords:

• Universal Basic Income (UBI)
• autonomy
• real freedom
• unenumerated rights
• positive constitutional rights
• constitutional interpretation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ava Thomas Wright, Pat Lin, Sonu Bedi, Michael Klarman, Andrew Lister, Matt Moore, Matt Zwolinsky, Jeffrey Brand, Laurie Shrage, Scott Bowman, Scott Simon, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable time and helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Leah Hamilton, Meric Yougun, and Allison Wright, “People Nowdays Will Take Everything They Can Get: American Perceptions of Basic Income Usage,” Journal of Policy Practice and Research 3, no. 2 (2022): 78.

2 Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 16.

3 Ronald Dworkin, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 73.

4 Stephen M. Griffin, “Constitutionalism in the United States: From Theory to Politics,” in Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment, ed. Sanford Levinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 41.

5 In the philosophical literature, my view is sufficientarian. According to Richard Arneson, “one may wonder if what is troubling about the example is the gap between rich and poor or rather the deplorable condition of the poor, which might continue unabated even if the gap itself were eliminated… If it is the inequality per se that is bad, then the gap between poor and rich would seem to be no worse than a same-sized gap between the life prospects of the rich and super-rich… What is morally important is that people have enough to bring them over the threshold of decent life prospects.” Richard Arneson, “Egalitarianism,” (Summer, 2013) https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/spr2023/entries/egalitarianism/.

6 West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 639 (1943).

7 Jack Balkin, “Preface” in What Obergefell v. Hodges Should Have Said, ed. Jack Balkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), xiii.

8 Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 19.

9 Baker v. Nelson, 409 U.S. 810 (1972).

10 See H.L.A. Hart’s famous discussion of the open-texturedness of legal language and the penumbra on uncertainty. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed., (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), 124–36.

11 Dworkin, Freedom’s Law, 7.

12 For H.L.A. Hart’s brief discussion of the inevitability of judicial lawmaking, see Hart, The Concept of Law, 274–76.

13 I thank Michael Klarman for bringing this this example to my attention. Ed Shanahan, “Happy the Elephant Isn’t Legally a Person, Top New York Court Rules,” New York Times (June 14, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/nyregion/happy-elephant-animal-rights.html.

14 John Christman, “Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/autonomy-moral/.

15 Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 20.

16 William Glod, Why It’s Okay to Make Bad Choices (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021); Sarah Conly, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

17 Kai Moller, “Two Conceptions of Positive Liberty: Towards an Autonomy-Based Theory of Constitutional Rights,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 29, no. 4 (2009), 758.

18 Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923); Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 269 U.S. 510 (1925); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972); Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494 (1977); Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (1990); Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003); Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

19 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992).

20 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).

21 Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992).

22 Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

23 James E. Fleming, Securing Constitutional Democracy: The Case of Autonomy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 89.

24 See, for instance, Cass Sunstein’s idea of judicial minimalism. Cass R. Sunstein, One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

25 Dworkin, Freedom’s Law, 2.

26 Ibid.

27 Gordon S. Wood, “Comment,” in Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 59-60.

28 Amy Downes and Stewart Lansley, “Introduction,” in It’s Basic Income: The Global Debate, eds Amy Downes and Stewart Lansley (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2018), 1.

29 Jurgen De Wispelaere and Lindsay Stirton, “The Many Faces of Universal Basic Income,” Political Quarterly 75, no. 3 (2004): 272.

30 Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 6.

31 Downes and Lansley, “Introduction,” 1.

32 De Wispelaere and Stirton, “The Many Faces of Universal Basic Income,” 266.

33 Katie Cruz, “A Feminist Case for Basic Income: An Interview with Kathi Weeks” Critical Legal Thinking (August 26, 2016), https://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/08/22/feminist-case-basic-income-interview-kathi-weeks/.

34 The Freedom Dividend, https://2020.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/.

35 See, for example, California’s guaranteed income experiment in Stockton. https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2023/02/universal-basic-income/.

36 Brian Barry, “Survey Article: Real Freedom and Basic Income,” Journal of Political Philosophy 4, no. 3 (1996), 275.

37 One recent poll is encouraging. A PEW survey, conducted online in August 2020, of 11,000 U.S. adults found that a majority of people, ages 18–29, (67%) support the federal government providing a guaranteed income of $1,000 per month to all adults, while 36% strongly oppose it. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/19/more-americans-oppose-than-favor-the-government-providing-a-universal-basic-income-for-all-adult-citizens/.

38 Matt Zwolinksy and Miranda Perry Fleischer, Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2023), 135–36.

39 Matthew Desmond, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/magazine/poverty-by-america-matthew-desmond.html.

40 Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America (New York, NY: Crown Books, 2023), 9–23.

41 Jeremy Waldron, “Homeless and the Issue of Freedom,” in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981-1991 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 334.

42 Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, 2.

43 Matt Zwolinsky, review of Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/journal/basic-income-a-radical-proposal-for-a-free-society-and-a-sane-economy-by-philippe-van-parijs-and-yannick-vanderborght; Caterina Calsamiglia and Sabine Flamand, review, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, Journal of Economic Literature 57, no. 3 (September 2019), 644.

44 See, for example, David P. Currie, “Positive and Negative Constitutional Rights,” University of Chicago Law Review 53 (1986), 864–90; Erwin Chemerinsky, “Making a Case for a Constitutional Right to Minimum Entitlements,” Mercer Law Review 44, no. 2 (1993), 525–41.

45 Frank I. Michelman, “Foreword: On Protecting the Poor Through the Fourteenth Amendment,” Harvard Law Review 83 (1969), 7–59. Goodwin Liu relies on shared understandings of social practices. Goodwin Liu, “Rethinking Constitutional Welfare Rights,” Stanford University Law Review 61 (2008), 203–69. Charles Black relies on the Ninth Amendment, the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble, and the General Welfare Clause to address the problem of poverty in the midst of affluence. Charles L. Black Jr., “Further Reflections on the Constitutional Justice of Livelihood,” Columbia Law Review 86 (1986), 1104–17. Sotirios Barber draws on similar textual sources to reach more or less the same constitutional conclusions. Sotirios A. Barber, Welfare and the Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

46 Bruce Ackerman and Amy Alstott, The Stakeholder Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

47 Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995).

48 Carole Pateman, “Democratizing Citizenship: Some Advantages of a Basic Income,” Politics and Society 32, no. 1 (2004): 89–105.

49 The first part of the second principle of justice, known as the difference principle, requires that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged to be reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage.” “The second principle applies to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations.” John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 53.

50 Jeremy Waldron, “John Rawls and the Social Minimum,” in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981-1991 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 250–70.

51 Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 65–119.

52 Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 2000), 70–111.

53 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

54 Matt Zwolinksy, “The Libertarian Case for Universal Basic Income,” in It’s Basic Income: The Global Debate, eds. Amy Downes and Stewart Lansley (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2018), 150–54.

55 Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 54–5.

56 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 191–92.

57 John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

58 Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 25.

59 See, for example, Jeremy Waldron, “The Core of the Case Against Judicial Review,” Yale Law Journal 115 (2006), 1382.

60 Downes and Lansley, “Introduction,” 7–8.

61 Jason Brennan, Why It’s Okay to Want to be Rich (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 5.

62 https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-277.html.

63 Downes and Lansley, “Introduction,” 5–6.

64 Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, 27–8.

65 Karl Widerquist, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No (Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee) (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

66 Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

67 Katie Cruz, “A Feminist Case for Basic Income: An Interview with Kathi Weeks” Critical Legal Thinking (August 26, 2016), https://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/08/22/feminist-case-basic-income-interview-kathi-weeks/.

68 Ibid.

69 John Christman, “Autonomy, Independence, and Poverty-Related Welfare Policies,” Public Affairs Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1998): 383–405.

70 Lee Knifton and Greg Inglis, “Poverty and Mental Health: Policy, Practice and Research Implications,” BJPsych Bulletin 44 (2020): 193–196, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7525587/.

71 Reed Jordan, “Poverty’s Toll on Mental Health,” Urban Wire (November 25, 2013), https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/povertys-toll-mental-health.

72 Ibid.

73 Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004), 62–3.

74 Matt Zwolinsky, review, Basic Income.

75 Ibid., 24.

76 Ed Whitfield, “Why a Basic Income is not Good Enough,” in It’s Basic Income: The Global Debate, eds Amy Downes and Stewart Lansley (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2018), 109–112.

77 David Schweickart, After Capitalism, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

78 For a Rawlsian constitutional approach, see Frank I. Michelman, “In Pursuit of Constitutional Welfare Rights: One View of Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 121, no. 5 (1973), 962–1019.

79 Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, 3.

80 Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 2; David Schweickart, After Capitalism, 75-6, 112–13.

81 Brian Barry, “Survey Article: Real Freedom and Basic Income,” 246.

82 Anthony B. Sanders, Baby-Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2023), 122.

83 Peter B. Edelman, “The Next Century of Our Constitution: Rethinking Our Duty to the Poor,” Hastings Law Journal 39 (1987): 1–61.

84 Frank I. Michelman, “Welfare Rights in a Constitutional Democracy,” Washington University Law Quarterly (1979): 665.

85 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72.

86 Jackson v. City of Joliet, 715 F.2d 1200, 1203 (7th Cir. 1983).

87 Harris v. McCrae, 448 U.S. 297 (1980).

88 San Antonio v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973).

89 David P. Currie, “Positive and Negative Constitutional Rights,” 886.

90 Richard L. Hasen, A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024), 57–9.

91 James E. Fleming, Constructing Basic Liberties: A Defense of Substantive Due Process (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 159.

92 Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966); Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963); Douglas v. California, 372 U.S. 353 (1963).

93 Erwin Chemerinsky, “Making a Case for a Constitutional Right to Minimum Entitlements.”

94 Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The Costs of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000), 43.

95 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1974).

96 Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1996).

97 Leif Wenar, “Rights,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/.

98 Jeremy Waldron, “Homeless and the Issue of Freedom,” in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981-1991 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 317.

99 See Chemerinsky, “Making a Case for a Constitutional Right to Minimum Entitlements,” 535.

100 On fundamental rights, see Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Walters Kluwer Law and Business, 2011), 812–18.

101 Lucas A. Powe Jr., The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 270–73.

102 Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004).

103 See William E. Forbath, “Social and Economic Rights in the American Grain: Reclaiming Constitutional Political Economy,” in The Constitution in 2020, eds Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegal (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 67.

104 Fleming, Constructing Basic Liberties, 127–47.

105 James Fishkin and William E. Forbath, https://balkin.blogspot.com/2023/01/giving-up-on-supreme-court-is-beginning.html.

106 Anonymous, “Positive Views of Supreme Court Decline Sharply Following Abortion Ruling” (September 2022) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/09/01/positive-views-of-supreme-court-decline-sharply-following-abortion-ruling/.

107 Barry Friedman, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 367–85.

108 Russ Feingold and Peter Prindiville, The Constitution in Jeopardy: An Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite Our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About It (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2022), 60–2.

109 Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 2000), 100.

110 Emily Zackin, Looking for Rights in all of the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

111 Chemerinsky, “Making a Case for a Constitutional Right to Minimum Entitlements,” 526.

112 Frank R. Cross, “The Error of Positive Rights,” UCLA Law Review 48, no. 4 (2001), 857–924.

113 On the judiciary’s lacking the power of the purse and the sword, see Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 78,” in Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 504.

114 Friedman, The Will of the People, 16.

115 Mark Tushnet, Weak Courts, Strong Rights: Judicial Review and Social Welfare Rights in Comparative Constitutional Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 34.

116 Mark A. Graber, “It’s Too Soon to Say if the Colorado Ballot Case Was a Loss for Anti-Trump Forces” (March 2024) https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/03/11/its-too-soon-to-say-if-the-colorado-ballot-case-was-a-loss-for-anti-trump-forces/.

117 Frank Michelman, “Economic Power and the Constitution,” in The Constitution in 2020, eds. Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegal (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49.

118 Barry, “Survey Article: Real Freedom and Basic Income,” 273.

119 Hannah Gilberstadt, “More Americans oppose than favor the government providing a universal basic income for all adult citizens” (August 2020) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-americans-oppose-than-favor-the-government-providing-a-universal-basic-income-for-all-adult-citizens/.

120 Bryant William Sculos, “Changing Lives and Minds: Progress, Strategy, and Universal Basic Income,” New Political Science 41, no. 2 (2019): 235.