Why Do Social Freedoms Become Forgotten Freedoms?

This paper engages in a comparative examination on tendencies of constitutional law in several Western liberal democratic states to render social freedoms into forgotten freedoms. These constitutional orders contain textual protections of social freedoms (including assembly, association, and other similar freedoms), but this text tends to receive less attention over extended periods of jurisprudential and scholarly development. The paper builds on some scholarly work on forgotten freedoms, including Inazu’s work on assembly in the United States and a forthcoming collection in Canada (which the author co-edited), but it adds a new dimension in seeking to use several key examples to highlight reasons behind the phenomenon of social freedoms becoming forgotten.