Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Publication
California Law Review
Volume
113
Abbreviation
Calif. L. Rev.
First Page
1723
Abstract
What duties do Americans owe the state? Today, this question seems almost incomprehensible. Compulsions in the common interest are received coolly in our rights-obsessed culture, and the Supreme Court has never announced a framework for identifying the burdens of citizenship. Yet the concept of civic duty has played a central role in America’s constitutional tradition. From shoveling snow to repairing roads to fighting overseas, private individuals have long been forced to serve the public in ways menial and profound. Strangely, the discourse of obligation that legitimated numerous compulsions has faded from professional view. Judges’ mawkish tributes to liberty pay no heed to the magnitude of state-ordered servitude.
This collective forgetting has not eliminated the need to reason about civic duties, however. Courts continue to review compulsions grounded in contested visions of social obligation. In ruling on the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, for example, the Supreme Court seriously impeded Congress from implementing novel conceptions of civic duty. This hostility closely tracks a leading scholarly account of civic duties as fixed by historical tradition. According to this narrative, living Americans are powerless to alter the basic obligations of citizenship.
This Article corrects the historical record by documenting how civic duties have developed over time. The evidence reveals that these obligations are constantly in motion; society has constructed, reshaped, and discarded them in decades-long struggles over the meaning of freedom. Put simply, the duties of citizenship are not fixed features of our constitutional order. They are inevitably responsive to moral and cultural change. These findings undercut the Court’s use of rigid historical methodologies for reviewing laws—like abortion restrictions—that tacitly presume the existence of duties owed to the public. And a panoramic view of civic duties casts new light on congressional efforts to preserve Indian tribes as flourishing governments. The federal Indian Child Welfare Act draws conceptual support from compulsory education and military conscription, both of which have long prioritized communal survival over individual choice.