The Bill of Rights established noble principles that guarantee the most fundamental rights in a very general form. But early on, real cases emerged that raised difficult questions about how, and even if, the Bill of Rights would be applied. Before paper rights could become real rights, someone had to interpret what the wording of the Bill of Rights meant in certain situations. Who would be the final arbiter of how to apply the Constitution? In the summer of 1787, delegates from all 13 states met in Philadelphia and drafted a remarkable blueprint for self-government – the Constitution of the United States. The first draft envisaged a system of checks and balances including a strong executive, a representative legislature and a federal judiciary. Essentially, the growing literature suggests that the motivation to punish appears to be a function of the landscape of decisions presented. Giving people more opportunities to restore justice, whether it is a directed reconciliation process between victim and perpetrator or simply focusing on compensating the injured party, could actually change people`s attitudes towards punishing a crime. Overall, these studies suggest that punishment – which is certainly desirable in some cases – should not always be seen as the gold standard of justice. From these experiences emerged a unique American vision of power and freedom as natural enemies. Believing that the reduction of governmental power and the protection of liberty were its most important task, the founders of the nation declared a new goal for the government: the protection of individual rights. The protection of rights was not the government`s only objective. It was always expected to protect the community from external and internal threats, ensure economic growth, and guide foreign policy. However, it was not the government`s job to tell people how to live their lives, what religion they believed in, or what to write about in a pamphlet or newspaper.
In this sense, the idea of individual rights is the oldest and most traditional American value. After months of reconciliation deliberations, during which both sides are invited to express their painful feelings, a Hutu perpetrator asks forgiveness from a Tutsi survivor of his crime – for example, a mother who survived the murder of her entire family. Many Tutsi survivors showed an impressive capacity for forgiveness and thus reconciled with their Hutu perpetrators. In an effort to heal neighbor relationships, this initiative emphasizes restoration and forgiveness, not punishment. In this way, it has the potential to curb the hatred and violence that fuels a cycle of revenge and retaliation. Native Americans were completely outside the constitutional system, defined as a foreign people in their own country. They were not governed by ordinary American laws, but by treaties and federal laws that deprived the tribes of most of their land and much of their autonomy. The Bill of Rights was in effect for nearly 135 years before Congress granted U.S. Native American citizenship. The ACLU, the NAACP founded in 1909, and unions whose right to exist had not yet been recognized by the courts began challenging constitutional violations on behalf of those who had already been expelled. This was the beginning of what is now called the public law.
They provided the missing ingredient that ultimately allowed our constitutional system and the Bill of Rights to work. As part of our 2014 sanctions studies, we also examined whether third parties, such as jurors, treat social misconduct differently than victims. In another series of games, we asked participants to behave like jurors – neutral third parties who punish the perpetrator and compensate those affected. First, participants observed that one person was very unevenly distributing money with another person. After observing this unfair treatment, participants had to decide how to divide the money between the person who divided the money and the person who received an unfair share. In most cases, third parties chose the most retributive option, where the victim was financially compensated and the offender was punished by reducing their payment. In a series of studies published in 2014, we asked more than 1,000 participants to play a game that required a participant to share a sum of money between themselves and another participant. Often, the first participant decided to keep the most money. After an unfair split, the second participant was asked how he would like to redistribute the money. One way to restore justice was to punish the perpetrator for unfair treatment by reducing that person`s cash payment – a reaction commonly seen both in the lab and in the real world. But we also gave participants other options, including the opportunity to rebalance the balance by increasing their own cash payment. We found that about nine out of 10 victims preferred to compensate themselves rather than receive a specific punishment, even after an extremely unfair separation.
While this result wasn`t particularly surprising (who doesn`t love money?), participants also felt that this result was enough to right the wrong: they usually didn`t decide to punish the transgressor as well – even if it was easy. Our data also offers hope for our overburdened and underfunded justice system. By focusing on restorative justice for the victim rather than punishing the offender, we could reduce the need for long prison sentences – a potential boon given that prison systems are full and expensive in the United States. In fact, emerging literature has begun to shift the focus from punishment to other means of restoring justice. In 2009, psychologist David Rand, then at Harvard University, and his colleagues reported the results of a game in which players could encourage each other to contribute to a shared pool by rewarding donations or punishing greed. Over the course of several rounds of play, Rand and her colleagues found that rewards, as opposed to punishments, increase overall gifts. In a paper published in 2014, economist Nikos Nikiforakis, now at New York University Abu Dhabi, and Helen Mitchell, head of policy at Australia`s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, revealed that people show an increased desire to punish when it is the only option available to restore justice. “A bill of rights is that which is due to the people against any government on earth, whether general or special, and which no just government should reject.” – Thomas Jefferson, December 20, 1787 American distrust of government power came from the colonial experience itself. Most historians believe that the decisive event was the Stamp Act, passed by the English Parliament in 1765. Taxes were levied on all legal and business documents. Newspapers, books and brochures were also taxed. Even more than the taxes themselves, Americans did not appreciate the fact that they had been imposed by a distant government in which they were not represented.
And they continued to be angry at the way the stamp law was enforced. Although the power of judicial review was introduced in 1803, more than a century passed before the Supreme Court even had many opportunities to protect the rights of individuals. 130 years after its ratification, the most remarkable thing about the Bill of Rights has been its almost total non-implementation by the courts. In the early 20th century, racial segregation was legal and permeated every aspect of American society. Gender discrimination has been firmly institutionalized and workers have been arrested for their trade union activities. Legal immigrants have been deported because of their political views, police have used physical coercion to extract confessions from suspects, and members of minority religions have been persecuted.