ABSTRACT
The Court's lack of enthusiasm for group rights is related to their paradoxical quality of simultaneously protecting and threatening individual liberty. This paradox requires analytic touchstones to guide the decision when the liberal state should intervene in the internal affairs of groups, such as groups' lack of foundational status in constitutional doctrine, whether group membership is consensual, and the extent to which group rights impose external costs on non-members. The imperative against a constitutional doctrine of group rights is the mirror image of the imperative for them: the threat that groups pose to individual identity, autonomy, and freedom. A much-noted contradiction of liberal theory is its tolerance of illiberal individuals and groups. This is an apparent consequence of the foundational premise of liberalism, that consensus on the good life is not achievable in conditions of religious and moral pluralism.
