Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
anigbrowl · 2011-12-14
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Look, I appreciate your sincerity but think you are really starting to eat your own tail here. The standard way of resolving the problems you describe is in fact to assume that rights are bundles of actionable interests and to compare the interests at stake in a conflict - such as the right of a private property owner to exercise control over a park vs the right of park visitors to express themselves. That comparison is often carried out using economic methods, where possible; obviously it's hard to quantify the utility of free speech to citizens, but many other kinds of rights can be quantified (and the disutility of restricting speech may be quantifiable if the the overall utility of allowing it is not).
Allow me to suggest this book, which is a great introduction to law and economics without being too technical in either subject: http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Analyst-Toolkit-Thinking-about/d... or if it is not to your taste, this one is good too: http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Order-What-Economics-Matters/dp/0... At the very least, check out Arrow's theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem which explains why ideal procedural outcomes are not possible.
The Law Student's Toolkit class on Coursera from Yale's Ian Ayers covers some similar ground. https://www.coursera.org/learn/law-student/