> If you're trying to do justice to the concept of negative freedom, then what definition are you using? To me, it's about being free to be left alone and go your own way, as opposed to being provided for (eg freedom from hunger, or whatever).

Yes, and for most people in America, this is unquestionably the case.

> I would classify a public defender as a mitigation of an impingement on negative freedom rather than a bona fide positive freedom. There are surely other countries where you have less of a chance of being harmed by the courts, because they compensate for their general infringement of freedom by giving you better protections to defend yourself from it.

It's debatable that the US public defender system somehow mitigates this impingement less effectively than any other Western country, indeed most western countries have similar public defender systems.

For the sake of argument, even if we were to accept that premise...the majority of Americans spend far more of their lives exercising the uniquely strong negative liberties extended to them than interfacing with the one aspect of American life in which a globally uniform impingement of negative rights is allegedly mitigated the least.

> The US has some of the most draconian copyright laws in the world. Are those outweighed by something else, or should we dispense with this notion of "most" ?

The US's copyright laws are on par with those in most of the Western world. All EU countries are signatories of the Berne Convention, and the copyright length in the US is the same as it is in France, Singapore, Switzerland, South Korea, Italy, UK, Australia, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark...