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Building on many years of scholarship, Matthew H. Kramer sets out his definitive philosophical investigation of rights and rights-holding with this monograph, as he sometimes revisits and modifies his previous positions. Beginning with the analytical schema propounded by the American legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld, the book provides a defence of the proposition that every claim-right with a certain content is correlative to at least one duty with the same content and that every duty with a certain content is correlative to at least one claim-right with the same content. The volume then addresses the longstanding debates over the nature of right-holding, with a sustained defense of the Interest Theory and with some innovative critiques of the Will Theory. Finally, it considers the ethical and analytical questions involved in determining who can hold claim-rights at all. It argues that the beings capable of holding claim-rights include not only human adults of sound mind but also all other living human beings, many dead people, and all future generations of people, along with most non-human animals. Addressing some major topics within moral, legal, and political philosophy,Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation will be a key work for philosophers and academic lawyers alike.

A thought-provoking examination of how insights from neuroscience challenge deeply held assumptions about morality and law. As emerging neuroscientific insights change our understanding of what it means to be human, the law must grapple with monumental questions, both metaphysical and practical. Recent advances pose significant philosophical challenges: how do neuroscientific revelations redefine our conception of morality, and how should the law adjust accordingly? Trialectic takes account of those advances, arguing that they will challenge normative theory most profoundly. If all sentient beings are the coincidence of mechanical forces, as science suggests, then it follows that the time has come to reevaluate laws grounded in theories dependent on the immaterial that distinguish the mental and emotional from the physical. Legal expert Peter A. Alces contends that such theories are misguided—so misguided that they undermine law and, ultimately, human thriving. Building on the foundation outlined in his previous work, The Moral Conflict of Law and Neuroscience, Alces further investigates the implications for legal doctrine and practice.

How does law possess the normative force it requires to direct our actions?This book argues that this seemingly innocuous question is of central importance to the philosophy of law and, by extension, of the very concept of law itself. It advances a position grounded in the secular natural law tradition, and in doing so addresses the two success criteria for this position head on: Firstly, that commitment to the existence of a supreme moral principle is required; Secondly, that any supreme moral principle must be identifiable through human reason.The book argues that these conditions are met by Alan Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), which – through a dialectically necessary argument – locates the existence of universally applicable moral norms in the concept of agency. Given the very purpose of law is to guide action, legal norms must be located in a unified hierarchy of practical reason. It follows that, if law is to succeed in claiming to be capable of guiding our action, moral permissibility with reference to the PGC is a necessary condition of a rule's legal validity. This strong theory of natural law is defended throughout, both against moral sceptics and positions within contemporary legal positivism.

Re-thinking Rights: Historical Development and Philosophical Justificationtakes a new look at the history of individual rights, focussing on the way that philosophers have written that history. The scholastics and early modern writers used the notion of natural rights to debate the big moral and political questions of the day, such as the treatment of Indigenous Americans under Spanish rule. John Locke put natural rights at the centre of liberal political thought. But as the idea grew in strength and influence, empiricist and positivist philosophers punctured it with attacks of logical incompetence and illegitimate appeals to theology and metaphysics. Philosophers then turned to law and jurisprudence for the philosophical analysis of rights, where it has largely stayed ever since. Eleanor Curran argues that the dominance of the Hohfeldian analysis of (legal) rights has restricted our understanding of moral and political rights and led to distorted readings of historical writers on rights. It has also led to the separation of right from the important related notion of liberty—freedoms are now seen as inferior to claims. Curran looks at recent philosophy of human rights and suggests a way forward for justifying universal moral and political rights and separating them from legal rights.

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was a leading figure in the Neo-Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He is also the inaugural figure for what is meant by'modern Jewish philosophy'in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen's striking claim that ethics is rooted in law – a claim developed in both his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on'love-of-neighbor,'up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason. Dana Hollander proposes that neither Cohen's systematic philosophy nor his'Jewish'philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions takes shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of'law'that this entails.

Das Gewissen befindet sich aufgrund der Tatsache, dass es feststehende allgemeingültige Maßstäbe des Guten in einer pluralistischen und säkularisierten Welt nicht mehr gibt, in einer Krise, welche nach Hannah Arendt im Nationalsozialismus kulminerte. Auf der anderen Seite hat jedoch die in Art. 4 GG garantierte Gewissensfreiheit nur dann eine Berechtigung, wenn der Staat nicht von einer absoluten Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit ausgeht, da ansonsten nicht einzusehen wäre, warum das Gewissen diese unterschiedlich reflektieren dürfen sollte. Hier zeigt sich ein scheinbar nicht aufzulösendes Spannungsverhältnis, wird das Gewissen doch in vielen Situationen des Alltags virulent. Das Buch soll einen neuen Umgang mit dem Gewissen und seiner Bedeutung für das Recht aufzeigen.

This book is the first authoritative text on virtue jurisprudence - the belief that the final end of law is not to maximize preference satisfaction or protect certain rights and privileges, but to promote human flourishing. Scholars of law, philosophy and politics illustrate here the value of the virtue ethics tradition to modern legal theory.

What does it mean to be responsible for our actions? In this brief and elegant study, Giorgio Agamben traces our most profound moral intuitions back to their roots in the sphere of law and punishment. Moral accountability, human free agency, and even the very concept of cause and effect all find their origin in the language of the trial, which Western philosophy and theology both transform into the paradigm for all of human life. In his search for a way out of this destructive paradigm, Agamben not only draws on minority opinions within the Western tradition but engages at length with Buddhist texts and concepts for the first time. In sum, Karman deepens and rearticulates some of Agamben's core insights while breaking significant new ground.

The Proliferation of Rights explores how the assertion of rights has expanded dramatically since World War II. Carl Wellman illuminates for the reader the historical developments in each of the major categories of rights, including human rights, civil rights, women's rights, patient rights, and animal rights. He concludes by assessing where this proliferation has been legitimate and helpful, cases where it has been illusory and unproductive, and alternatives to the appeal to rights.

This book centres on the notion of human life that lies at the foundation of contemporary thinking in the areas of ethics, law and politics.Centrally, the book addresses the deep divide, characteristic of this thinking, between: on the one hand, those who wish to do away with any anthropological understandings of the human, and appeal to mere facts delivered by science; and, on the other hand, critics who defend an anthropological understanding of human life that is tied to traditional, teleological, metaphysics. In short: knowledge of the world is given over to the sciences and moral theory is considered to operate in a distinct, and insulated, domain. But this opposition has, Piergiorgio Donatelli argues here, outlived its usefulness. Through a discussion of the intimate human spheres of reproduction, dying and sexuality, he argues that we now live in a world characterized by new ways of living: by novel rearrangements of emotions, and by the modification, and in some cases a radical rupture in, existing ideas of human life. These shifts challenge any established separation between facts and norms, between human life and its conceptualization. As such, it is argued here, they simultaneously offer the possibility of a new, socially articulated, understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and normativity.Engaging pressing contemporary themes, this book will be invaluable to scholars in the fields of ethics, law and political theory, and both analytic and continental philosophy.

In analyzing the socio-psychic nature and operations of intuitive legal rules, Petrazycki formulates a theory of law around five conceptual themes: anti-formalism, imperative-attributive legal relationships, law's functional control, law's subjective reality and morality. Petrazycki presents the two ways by which law coordinates and regulates social conduct as through its distributive and organizing functions. Law and Morality has a basic objective: to analyze interrelations between positive and intuitive law. Petrazycki's socio-psychic orientation toward law is behavioral as well as thoughtful. He finds the most suitable methods for obtaining knowledge about legal experiences to be internal and external observation. His technique of introspection is similar to Max Weber's conceptual method. Petrazycki distinguishes between two kinds of interpretive understanding. External observation involves deriving the meaning of an act or symbolic expression from immediate observation without reference to any broader context, and internal observation involves placing the particular act in a broader context of meaning involving facts that cannot be derived from a particular act or expression. Petrazycki's socio-legal ideas remain relevant in today's society. His arguments concerning the global expansion of human love have an attraction for those working towards a better world. In the context of positive psychology and the growing happiness industry, Petrazycki's ideas will compel legal scholars to consider his arguments. Petrazycki's work stands out for the scientific ambitions and systematic nature of his thought as well as the influence of his work on later scholars in the sociology of law.

This original collection of jurisprudential essays furthers our understanding of the nature of rights. In Part 1, Halpin considers the value of Hohfeldian neutrality when theorising about law in general, and legal rights in particular, and Kurki focuses on Hohfeld's operative notion of power. In Part 2, Kramer rebuts Wenar's objections to his Interest Theory of rights, and May provides a comparative defence of the Interest Theory against Wenar's Kind-Desire theory of claim-rights. Penner then pursues legal doctrine, focusing on whether judges hold the powers of their office as rights, an issue over which Wenar and Kramer have clashed. Sreenivasan, utilising a novel test case involving pure public goods, argues that the third party beneficiary objection to the Interest Theory is fatal. McBride builds on Sreenivasan's Hybrid Theory of claim-rights to construct his new Tracking Theory of rights. Cruft then argues that the best extant versions of the Interest and Will Theories of rights cannot avoid a form of circularity, and Van Duffel argues that meeting four adequacy constraints, which he proposes, counts in favour of any theory of rights. In Part 3, Andersson proposes a tie breaking procedure for rights conflicts in the applied realm of politics, and Steiner concludes by alleging that Kant's principle of right, a standard of corrective justice, has distributive implications.'A fine collection of cutting-edge essays on the most important normative concept of modernity.'Professor Leif Wenar, King's College London'This important collection proceeds much beyond the famous 1998 A Debate Over Rights which sets the stage for the debates concerning rights since then. It explores three aspects of rights. First it re-examines the Hohfeldian classification and highlights its importance and relevance. Second it investigates and develops the debates between the interest and the will theory. It includes essays by the main established proponents of these two positions as well as essays by newcomers to this field. The different essays in this part address each other in ways which sharpen and clarify the disagreements and provide new original arguments for the contending views. Last, it provides a new perspective on the debates concerning conflicts of rights and the ways to overcome them. This collection will no doubt dominate the future conceptual discussions concerning the nature of rights and their role in political theory.'Professor Alon Harel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Law's Judgement elucidates and defends a feature of contemporary law that is currently either overlooked or too glibly dismissed as morally troublesome or historically anachronistic. That feature is the abstract nature of law's judgement and its three components show that, when law judges us, it often does so in ignorance of our particular characters and abilities, on the one hand, and in ignorance of our context and circumstances, on the other. Law's judgement is thus insensitive to all or much that makes us the particular people we are. The book explores various connections between this mode of judgement and some of our most important legal and political values. It shows that law's abstract judgement is closely related to important juristic conceptions of personhood, responsibility and impartiality, and that these notions are not without moral significance. The book also examines the connections between modern law's judgement and three of our most important political values, namely, dignity, equality and community. It argues that, if we value particular conceptions of dignity, equality and community, then we must also value law's judgement. Illuminating these connections therefore serves a double purpose: first, it makes a case against those who counsel liberation from law's abstract judgement and, second, it redirects attention to the task of morally evaluating law's abstract judgement in its own terms.

The essays collected in this volume reflect the profound impact of Martha Nussbaum‘s philosophical writings on law and legal scholarship. The capabilities approach that she has largely authored has influenced the approach scholars take to the law of disabilities, both in the United States and in Canada, as well as to international human rights and to domestic private law‘s protections of vulnerable populations. Her analyses of the relationship between our emotions and our thought and action has triggered a re-assessment of the legal regulation and recognition of emotion in a range of fields, most particularly in the field of criminal law; and her writing on the nature of dignity has informed an understanding of the emerging civil rights of gay and lesbian citizens worldwide. Our appreciation of the role of narrative in legal thought and discourse and the contributions of literature to law and legal culture, have also been broadened and deepened by her contributions. Taken together, and including the introduction by the editor, the essays collected in this volume demonstrate the far-reaching impact of Nussbaum‘s philosophical oeuvre.

Law's Ethical, Global and Theoretical Contexts examines William Twining's principal contributions to law and jurisprudence in the context of three issues which will receive significant scholarly attention over the coming decades. Part I explores human rights, including torture, the role of evidence in human rights cases, the emerging discourse on'traditional values', the relevance of'Southern voices'to human rights debates, and the relationship between human rights and peace agreements. Part II assesses the impact of globalization through the lenses of sociology and comparative constitutionalism, and features an analysis of the development of pluralistic ideas of law in the context of privatization. Finally, Part III addresses issues of legal theory, including whether global legal pluralism needs a concept of law, the importance of context in legal interpretation, the effect of increasing digitalization on legal theory, and the utility of feminist and postmodern approaches to globalization and legal theory.

You live in the country of Torcia, a society defined by sex, greed, and addictive behaviour. You read vignettes about criminal and civil offences in the homes, streets, and prisons of Torcia. Traditional systems of crime and punishment don't seem to be working. The Judgement Game invites you to find out what has gone wrong and what can be done about it. The Judgement Game is an interactive book asking for your ideas about offences committed and your suggestions as to punishment imposed on offenders. This is your opportunity to play a role in the justice system of your country. The punishment Torcia will use and why is your decision. Your experiences and decision-making power are valued and can help Torcia find ideas to address its problems. You are playing a game that has been played for centuries. Only the players and the rules of the game change. The Judgement Game has returned justice to the people in this game. Play the judgement game to see if you will win!

Since the Enlightenment, the definition of terms such as humanity, citizenship and rights has fluctuated and these ideas continue to have relevance for contemporary discussions of globalization from a «cosmopolitan» perspective. This volume goes back to the conception of cosmopolitanism in Greek antiquity in order to trace it through history, resulting in an unmasking of its many myths. The concept is reconstructed with reference not only to well-known (and some lesser known) historical thinkers of cosmopolitanism, but also to noted «anti-cosmopolitans». The first aim of the book is to display historical perspectives on a discourse which has been dominated by ahistorical presumptions. The second is to critically explore alternative paths beyond the Western imagination, redefining the Enlightenment legacy and the centre-periphery dichotomy. Most notably, Eastern Europe and the Arab world are integrated within the analysis of cosmopolitanism. Within a framework of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), cosmopolitan reason is criticized from the viewpoints of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, postcolonialism and moral philosophy. The book's critical approach is an attempt to come to terms with the anachronism, essentialism, ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism that sometimes underlie contemporary theoretical and methodological uses of the term «cosmopolitanism». By adding historical and contextual depth to the problem of cosmopolitanism, a reflexive corrective is presented to enhance ongoing discussions of this topic within as well as outside academia.

This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and Fineman's ‘vulnerability thesis'. The collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, it is of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.

Martha Albertson Fineman's earlier work developed a theory of inevitable and derivative dependencies as a way of problematizing the core assumptions underlying the'autonomous'subject of liberal law and politics in the context of US equality discourse. Her'vulnerability thesis'represents the evolution of that earlier work and situates human vulnerability as a critical heuristic for exploring alternative legal and political foundations. This book draws together major British and American scholars who present different perspectives on the concept of vulnerability and Fineman's'vulnerability thesis'. The contributors include scholars who have thought about vulnerability in different ways and contexts prior to encountering Fineman's work, as well as those for whom Fineman's work provided an introduction to thinking through a vulnerability lens. This collection demonstrates the broad and intellectually exciting potential of vulnerability as a theoretical foundation for legal and political engagements with a range of urgent contemporary challenges. Exploring ways in which vulnerability might provide a new ethical foundation for law and politics, the book will be of interest to the general reader, as well as academics and students in fields such as jurisprudence, philosophy, legal theory, political theory, feminist theory, and ethics.

Are all of the commonly accepted aims of the use of law justifiable? Which kinds of behavior are justifiably prohibited, which kinds justifiably required? What uses of law are not defensible? How can the legitimacy or the ille­ gitimacy of various uses of law be explained or accounted for? These are questions the answering of which involves one in many issues of moral principle, for the answers require that one adopt positions - even if only implicitly - on further questions of what kinds of actions or policies are morally or ethically acceptable. The present work, aimed at questions of these kinds, is thus a study in the ethical evaluation of major uses of legal coercion. It is an attempt to provide a framework within which many questions about the proper uses of law may be fruitfully discussed. The framework, if successful, can be used by anyone asking questions about the defensibility of particular or general uses of law, whether from the perspective of someone considering whether to bring about some new legal provision, from the perspective of someone concerned to evaluate an eXisting provision, or from that of someone concerned more abstractly with questions about the appropriate substance of an ideal legal system. In addressing these and associated issues, I shall be exploring the extent to which an ethics based on respect for persons and their autonomy can handle satisfactorily the problems arising here.

Lon L Fuller's account of what he termed'the internal morality of law'is widely accepted as the classic twentieth century statement of the principles of the rule of law. Much less accepted is his claim that a necessary connection between law and morality manifests in these principles, with the result that his jurisprudence largely continues to occupy a marginal place in the field of legal philosophy.In'Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L Fuller', Kristen Rundle offers a close textual analysis of Fuller's published writings and working papers to explain how his claims about the internal morality of law belong to a wider exploration of the ways in which the distinctive form of law introduces meaningful limits to lawgiving power through its connection to human agency. By reading Fuller on his own terms,'Forms Liberate'demonstrates why his challenge to a purely instrumental conception of law remains salient for twenty-first century legal scholarship.

The premise of this book is that a shift of vantage will help elucidate various important issues of law related to judging, to bills of rights and to more abstract questions of legal philosophy. The work begins by focussing on the jurisprudential issue of whether it is desirable to keep separate the demands of law and of morality and uses the device of changing vantages to elucidate the many issues that fall under that aegis. This is followed by a consideration of how judges ought to do their job when interpreting and whether the rule of law ideal differs from rule by judges. The last part of the book focuses explicitly on bills of rights. Building on the earlier parts, the author uses his device of shifting vantages to provide insights into how these instruments affect democratic decision-making and from which perspectives they will look attractive and unattractive. Written in a clear, accessible and engaging style, the book demonstrates that vantage point is a key criterion affecting how one understands and evaluates, firstly, some of the theoretical debates in jurisprudence and then, secondly, what judges are doing and whether a bill of rights is desirable or not.

First published in 1980, Natural Law and Natural Rights is widely heralded as a seminal contribution to the philosophy of law, and an authoritative restatement of natural law doctrine. It has offered generations of students and other readers a thorough grounding in the central issues of legal, moral, and political philosophy from Finnis's distinctive perspective. This new edition includes a substantial postscript by the author, in which he responds to thirty years of discussion, criticism and further work in the field to develop and refine the original theory. The book closely integrates the philosophy of law with ethics, social theory and political philosophy. The author develops a sustained and substantive argument; it is not a review of other people's arguments but makes frequent illustrative and critical reference to classical, modern, and contemporary writers in ethics, social and political theory, and jurisprudence. The preliminary First Part reviews a century of analytical jurisprudence to illustrate the dependence of every descriptive social science upon evaluations by the theorist. A fully critical basis for such evaluations is a theory of natural law. Standard contemporary objections to natural law theory are reviewed and shown to rest on serious misunderstandings. The Second Part develops in ten carefully structured chapters an account of: basic human goods and basic requirements of practical reasonableness, community and'the common good'; justice; the logical structure of rights-talk; the bases of human rights, their specification and their limits; authority, and the formation of authoritative rules by non-authoritative persons and procedures; law, the Rule of Law, and the derivation of laws from the principles of practical reasonableness; the complex relation between legal and moral obligation; and the practical and theoretical problems created by unjust laws. A final Part develops a vigorous argument about the relation between'natural law','natural theology'and'revelation'- between moral concern and other ultimate questions.

Auf der Grundlage der phänomenologischen Betrachtung und Methodik stellt Julia Hänni in der vorliegenden Publikation die Werteaffinität des Rechts und gleichermaßen die Notwendigkeit spezifischer intuitiver Wertungskompetenzen des Rechtsanwenders dar. Die Besonderheit der phänomenologischen Betrachtungsweise liegt in der Analyse der Wahrnehmung: Die Wahrnehmung enthält in sich eine spezifische Kompetenz der intuitiven Wertung. Insbesondere bei Fragen, die Konflikte zwischen ethischen Grundwerten hervorrufen, erscheint die Kompetenz eines primären intuitiven Wertungsvermögens als zentrales Richtigkeitskriterium für eine angemessene Bewertung und Entscheidung. Auf der Basis der intuitiven Wertung werden grundlegende ethische Werte regelmäßig als'objektiv'erlebt, das heißt als objektive Handlungsanweisungen, die unser Entscheidungsverhalten stark prägen. Die Kompetenz eines primären intuitiven Wertungsvermögens impliziert ein subjektives Element der Entscheidung, das aber nicht willkürlich ist: Vielmehr ist es Teil eines eigenständigen emotionalen Urteilsvermögens, das vom Gesetzgeber vorausgesetzt und in der Praxis der Gerichte auf verschiedene Weise, teils ausdrücklich und oftmals auch implizit berücksichtigt wird. Dieses emotionale Urteilsvermögen wird als letzte Instanz dargestellt, zu der unsere Bemühungen um Gerechtigkeit vordringen können. Ausgezeichnet mit dem Walther Hug Preis der Universität St. Gallen für die beste juristische Dissertation des akademischen Jahres 2010.

What this book intends to do is to study three-dimensionalism (the distinction values-norms-facts) not in what could be called its historical dimension, but in its substantive aspect, as a “form” that, when applied to different legal themes, would add a “material content” to the three-dimensional theory. We can point out, as a study plan, the distinction between “three” perspectives: Those of the legal norm, of the legal order, and the legal relationship. Three-dimensionalism also appears in this work when one analyzes the “three” phases of the life of the law: The formation, the interpretation, and the application; and in the distinction between the “three” characteristics of the legal order: Fullness, coherence, and unity—the theory of legal validity, intended as legitimacy, as validity strictly speaking, or as effectiveness.

The role of law in government has been increasingly scrutinized as courts struggle with controversial topics such as assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, capital punishment, and torture. Reflections on Life, Death, and the Constitution explores such issues by using classical standards of morality as a starting point for understanding them. Drawing on works of literature and philosophy, and on U.S. Supreme Court decisions, George Anastaplo examines the intimate relationship between human nature and constitutional law.

What is the ultimate task of law? This deceptively simple question guides this volume towards a radically original philosophical interpretation of law and justice. Weaving together the philosophical, jurisprudential and ethical problems suggested by five general terms - thinking, human suffering, legal meaning, time and tragedy - the book places the idea of law's ultimate task in the context of what actually happens when people seek to do justice and enforce legal rights in a world that is inflected by the desperation and suffering of the many. It traces the rule of law all the way down to its most fundamental level: the existence of universal human suffering and how it is that law-doers inflict or tolerate that suffering.

Discussions of rights are ubiquitous. One constantly hears things such as: “The Chinese are violating Tibetan rights,” “Landlords have a right that their tenants pay their rent,” “Students have a right to be graded fairly,” “Animals have a right not to suffer merely to bring pleasure to humans,” “Abortion violates a fetus'right to life,” “We violate the rights of future generations when we pollute the water. ” These statements assert that Tibetans, landlords, students, animals, fetuses, and future generations all have rights. Tibetans, landlords, students, animals, fetuses, and future generations do not seem to have much in common. When one presses for clarity, it is very dif?cult to say precisely what a right is. What is it to have a right? That is the question this book seeks to answer. To paint with an overly broad brush, previous answers to this question can be divided into two groups. Some hold interest/bene?t theories of rights while others hold choice/will theories of rights. Perhaps the?rst person to propose an interest/bene?t theory was Jeremy Bentham. Its most cited contemporary defender is Joseph Raz. The seminal statement of the choice theory was made by H. L. A. Hart. Carl Wellman is perhaps the most able defender of a will theory of rights. The debate between these two groups of theories has been a productive one.

Medical Law and Moral Rights discusses live issues arising in modern medical practice. Do patients undergoing intolerable irremediable suffering have a moral right to physician-assisted suicide? Ought they to have a comparable legal right? Do the moral duties of a mother to care for and not abuse her child also apply to her fetus? Ought fetuses to be given legal rights requiring pregnant women to submit to medical treatment without their consent? Ought single women, homosexual couples or persons carrying serious genetic defects to have a legal right to procreate? Ought a physician to perform an abortion requested for some frivolous reason? Ought physicians to be permitted to refuse to provide medically futile treatment demanded by their patients? An examination of relevant court cases shows how United States law answers these questions. The author then advocates improvements in the law to make it respect our moral rights more fully. To justify his conclusions, he proposes original conceptions of the human rights to life, procreational autonomy, privacy, equitable treatment and personal security. Thus, these essays test the usefulness of the theory of rights explained and defended in An Approach to Rights and elsewhere.

Rules perform a moral function by restating moral principles in concrete terms, so as to reduce the uncertainty, error, and controversy that result when individuals follow their own unconstrained moral judgment. Although reason dictates that we must follow rules to avoid destructive error and controversy, rules—and hence laws—are imperfect, and reason also dictates that we ought not follow them when we believe they produce the wrong result in a particular case. In The Rule of Rules Larry Alexander and Emily Sherwin examine this dilemma.Once the importance of this moral and practical conflict is acknowledged, the authors argue, authoritative rules become the central problems of jurisprudence. The inevitable gap between rules and background morality cannot be bridged, they claim, although many contemporary jurisprudential schools of thought are misguided attempts to do so. Alexander and Sherwin work through this dilemma, which lies at the heart of such ongoing jurisprudential controversies as how judges should reason in deciding cases, what effect should be given to legal precedent, and what status, if any, should be accorded to “legal principles.” In the end, their rigorous discussion sheds light on such topics as the nature of interpretation, the ancient dispute among legal theorists over natural law versus positivism, the obligation to obey law, constitutionalism, and the relation between law and coercion.Those interested in jurisprudence, legal theory, and political philosophy will benefit from the edifying discussion in The Rule of Rules.

The Proliferation of Rights explores how the assertion of rights has expanded dramatically since World War II. Carl Wellman illuminates for the reader the historical developments in each of the major categories of rights, including human rights, civil rights, women's rights, patient rights, and animal rights. He concludes by assessing where this proliferation has been legitimate and helpful, cases where it has been illusory and unproductive, and alternatives to the appeal to rights.

Immanuel Kants „Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre“, 1797 als erster Teil der „Metaphysik der Sitten“ erschienen, stellen einen Beitrag zur neuzeitlichen Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie dar. Hinsichtlich der normativen Prinzipien von Recht und Staat entwickelt Kant eine erfahrungsunabhängige, insofern metaphysische Theorie. Sie beginnt mit einem angeborenen und unveräußerlichen Menschenrecht und geht dann zu den Institutionen des Eigentums und des Rechtsstaates über. Besonders aktuell ist die Formulierung eines rechts- und friedensfunktionalen Völkerrechts und eines Weltbürgerrechts. Darüber hinaus behandelt Kant auch das Ehe und Familienrecht, das Verhältnis von Staat und Kirche und das Straf- und Begnadigungsrecht. Durch den thematischen Reichtum und die begriffliche Genauigkeit, vor allem jedoch durch die Radikalität seiner Fragen und die Originalität der Antworten ist Kants Rechtsdenken bis heute von hohem systematischem Rang. Die elf Beiträger dieses kooperativen Kommentars nehmen die bleibend gültigen Provokationen der „Metaphysischen Anfangsgründe“ ernst.

As relevant to today's debates about law and order and punishment as when they were published, titles in this set put forward the central principle that it is impossible to think about contemporary problems without thinking about society. Covering topics such as youth crime, legal aid, youth detention and the causes of criminal behaviour, titles in this set are still key to any study of law and criminology.

Powerful emotion and pursuit of self-interest have many times led people to break the law with the belief that they are doing so with sound moral reasons. This study, a comprehensive philosophical and legal analysis of the gray area in which the foundations of law and morality clash, views these oblique circumstances from two perspectives: that of the person who faces a possible conflict between the claims of morality and law and must choose whether or not to obey the penal code; and that of the people who make and uphold laws and must decide whether to treat someone with a moral claim to disobey differently from ordinary lawbreakers. In examining the extent of the obligations owed by citizens to their government, Greenawalt concentrates on the possible existence of a single source of obligation that reaches all citizens and all laws. He also discusses techniques of amelioration of punishment for conscientious lawbreakers, asking how far legal systems should go to accommodate individuals who break the law for reason of conscience. Drawing from numerous examples of conflicts between law and morality, Greeawalt illustrates in detail the positions and predicaments of potential lawbreakers and lawmakers alike.