[VOL. 48: 773, 2011] Socioeconomic Rights and Theories ofJustice SAN DIEGO LAW REVIEW In general, it is arguable that the civil and political liberties on Rawls's list can be dealt with qua rights separately from the other concerns of a theory of justice. In and of themselves, the civil and political liberties do not have massive implications for the issues of social and economic distribution that Rawls's other principle addresses. 5 (I do not mean that civil and political rights have no resource implications at all; I mean that their resource implications are patchy, sporadic, and often indirect.) Socioeconomic rights, on the other hand, have very substantial implications, both for the resources that Rawls's Second Principle is likely to govern and for the basis of our overall assessment of the impact of the basic structure on people's life prospects. This means, first, that if socioeconomic rights were included in the First Principle, then the First Principle would do much of the work supposedly allocated to the Second Principle.66 And it means, second, that if socioeconomic rights were inserted in this fashion anywhere in Rawls's theory-not necessarily under the auspices of the First Principle-then it would turn out to be the case that a very substantial part of the work of the theory would consist simply in a list of rights, and its systematic theoretical character would be largely lost. One gets the impression that some if not most of the conclusions of Rawls's theory are supposed to be presented as derivations from "general definitions and comprehensive first principles," even if the list of basic liberties is not.67 But if socioeconomic rights are articulated in the way we have been imagining, then it will be the case that the whole theory begins to look makeshift, not just a part of it. All of this leaves open the possibility, however, that when it comes to the elaboration and defense of his Second Principle, Rawls might be constrained by the original-position method to include fundamental constraints that require attention to the issue of poverty and deprivation. After all, the Second Principle is itself complex: it conjoins the Difference Principle with a Principle of Equal Opportunity that constrains its 65. See STEPHEN HOLMES & CASS R. SUNSTEIN, THE COST OF RIGHTS 115-16 (1999); HENRY SHUE, BASIC RIGHTS 75-76 (1980). 66. H.L.A. Hart, Rawls on Liberty and Its Priority,in READING RAWLS 230, 23637 (Norman Daniels ed., 1989) made an analogous criticism of Rawls's early suggestion that the First Principle governed the distribution of liberty in general, not just specific basic liberties. Because all resource allocation involves the allocation of liberty via the right to use and the right to exclude, such an agenda would cover the whole domain of resource use. 67. RAWLS, supra note 60, at 292. 795