The constitutional entrenchment of economic and social rights often requires courts to intervene directly in the administration of government. Such rights – to access goods, services, and programs such as social security, education, and health care – are now present in more than two-thirds of the world’s constitutions.1 Newer constitutional amendments extend such rights to housing, land, water, and a clean environment, implicating a wide array of government actions or omissions. Moreover, despite the conventional wisdom that such rights should not be enforced by courts, and should be entrenched at most as directive principles or other statements of aspiration, the duties for government that such rights create are increasingly justiciable.2 For better or worse, courts have become central in enforcing both negative and positive duties, in complaints arising from such matters as medical treatment denials, evictions, education outcomes, pollution levels, or food distribution schemes.

This chapter considers what sort of duties are generated by the right of resistance and how they might attach to affluent persons. This chapter begins by distinguishing duties of resistance from more often discussed non-ideal duties of justice and assistance. There might be significant similarities between these various groups of duties, but distinguishing them puts the agency of resisting agents in the foreground.

It argues that there are three categories of negative duties: non-intervention, one ought not to directly interfere with resisting agents; non-collaboration, one ought not to assist institutions dedicated to crushing resistance; non-obstruction, one ought not to interfere with organisations assisting resistance. The duties are neither too excessive or too permissive.

There are also positive duties to support resistance. These duties appear to be rather demanding, as shown in the example of French citizens prosecuted for assisting illegal immigrants, but they might be acted on in various non-criminal ways, such as supporting ‘sanctuary city’ policies. These duties may require sacrifices, but the alternative is to allow people to live under much more onerous burdens.