The Interests of Posterity in the Constitutional Scheme

Abstract

This Article explores the nature of our society's inclination, manifested increasingly throughout the past half century, to shift substantial costs and risks onto future generations. The Article draws upon cultural history, the idea of partnership and the lessons of partnership law, the history of deferral of gratification, the idea of a social discount rate, and philosophical analyses of rights, including the discussion of whether it makes sense to say that nonexistent people have rights in the present. The argument focuses upon generational cost-shifting in the law of marital dissolution, environ- mental law, and most crucially, in the federal government's statutory policy choices in areas such as social security funding, public savings rates, and public indebtedness incurred to finance current general consumption.