 Robin West paints a similar historical picture, though her focus is on legal doctrine rather than on the general public understanding. She writes, “We don’t have a civil right to much of anything, beyond the right to nondiscrimination … under our contemporary conception of civil rights” (2019: 74). West explains how the U.S. Supreme Court has been instrumental in the current dominance of this idea of civil rights, but she also points to the role that mainstream legal scholarship has played. By contrast with this current idea, according to the “classical understanding” (29) held by 19th century jurists, civil rights “were not simply rights ’not to be discriminated against’ on the basis of impermissible characteristics,” but also included “unambiguously rights to something: . . . to protection and security, to enter and enforce contracts, to own buy or sell property” and other categorical claims essential to “membership in society” (149–50 and 157, emphasis in original). As a progressive liberal who seeks to have legal doctrine recognize substantive economic claims as rights of citizenship, West aims to transcend the standard idea by subordinating it to an updated version of the classical understanding.