Public Order Vs. Individual Rights Term Paper

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In its perfect state, enforcing public order would, by its definition, secure and maintain the individual rights of its citizens. However, also by agreeing that another party has the right and responsibility to enforce public order, citizens give up some of their individual rights.

By living in the United States, one has made a quasi-contractual agreement to abide by the laws that govern the country. As such, individuals have surrendered at least some of their individual rights in the name of public order. As an example:

ten people who live on an island may all possess liberty to do as they please. These people, however, constantly fight with one another over the limited food on the island. The ten people can use their liberty to enter a contract, which grants one of the individuals the power to make and enforce the rules they will all live by. These individuals have essentially contracted away a portion of their liberty for the sake of survival, creating a situation in which consent exists in the absence of liberty (Hale, 1999).

The Criminal Justice and its Concern with Public Order:

It is this public order that the criminal justice system needs to concern itself with. The citizens of America have given their consent to relinquish some of their individual liberties, to ensure that public order is maintained by the criminal justice system. Therefore it is their duty.

As mentioned earlier, certainly the criminal justice system should be concerned that they are not infringing upon a citizen's negative rights, however they were not established to enforce the positive rights that individuals have. They were put in place to ensure public order was maintained.

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Individual rights has many other champions, such as the ACLU, who fight in the courtrooms, on collegiate campuses, and in the legislature, to try to tip the delicately balanced scales that weight individual rights and public order. These organizations often skew individual rights to that dysfunctional extreme discussed previously, and it is only through maintaining some semblance of public order that the scales can be righted and chaos averted. And it is this "public order (which is) guaranteed by state authority" (Gregg, 2004) such as the criminal justice system.

Conclusion:

According to some,

American law of civil rights and liberties has been increasingly manipulated, redefined, and expanded at the urging of people with little understanding or sympathy for the traditions and ideas on which this body of law is properly based. A consequence of this, largely unintended by the rights-and-liberties militants, has been to marginally disable major American institutions, both governmental and private. It has also rendered more difficult the already daunting task of maintaining minimum standards of public manners and morals (Williamson, 1985).

For this reason, public order is needed to "re-establish equilibrium between liberty and governmental authority" (Hale, 1999).

Individual rights unchecked can throw this delicate balancing act off kilter. For this reason, the criminal justice system should concern itself with the protection of public order, in order to maintain this balance. It is "public order and the preservation of the human race (that) are the underlying prinicples of justification for any society" (Hale, 1999). and, in the end, it is the criminal justice system's duty to protect "the right of the public to public order" (Weeks, 1995)......

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