In a devastating narrative that spans more than three centuries, the authors maintain that the drive for African-American equality has never had the support of the majority of Americans. Despite the great racial upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, and the federal government's attempts to give blacks the right to vote, hold office, own land, and enjoy full citizenship, Jim Crow and "separate but equal" became the law of the land. And the spectacular gains of the civil rights era of the 1960s were followed by a discouraging backlash in the 1980s. Racial progress was made only in brief historical bursts when a committed militant minority -- abolitionists, radical republicans, civil rights activists -- stirred the nation, pressuring it to change. Invariably, however, these advances have been followed by concerted efforts to restore white privilege.
This book explains what inalienable rights are and how they restrict the behavior of their possessors. McConnell develops compelling arguments to support the inalienability of the right to life, the right of conscience, and a competent person's right not to have medical treatment administered without consent. Yet, surprisingly, he argues that the inalienability of the right to life does not entail that voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide are wrong. This distinctive defense of inalienable rights will appeal to medical ethicists and other applied ethicists, political theorists, and philosophers of law.
When Rowan Layne emerges from a grueling exam to panic over news of aliens among us, practicing law loses its luster. She's not ready to discover her own alien DNA percentage, but needs answers about voices in her overly sensitive ears. And if she keeps riling officials with views on alien rights in her newspaper column, she might need to move.
As reports of genocide, terrorism, and political violence fill today’s newscasts, more attention has been given to issues of human rights—but all too often the sound bites seem overly simplistic. Many Westerners presume that non-Western peoples yearn for democratic rights, while liberal values of toleration give way to xenophobia. This book shows that the identification of rights with contemporary liberal democracy is inaccurate and questions the assumptions of many politicians and scholars that rights are self-evident in all circumstances and will overcome any conflicts of thought or interest. Rethinking Rights offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law to emphasize rights as a natural outgrowth of a social understanding of human nature and dignity. The authors argue that every person comes to consciousness in a historical and cultural milieu that must be taken into account in understanding human rights, and they describe the omnipresence of concrete, practical rights in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts. By rooting our understanding of rights in both history and the order of existence, they show that it is possible to understand rights as essential to our lives as social beings but also open to refinement within communities. An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence to clarify the experience of rights within the Western tradition. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights. Steering a middle course between radical individualist and extreme egalitarian views, Rethinking Rights proposes a new philosophy of rights appropriate to today’s world, showing that rights need to be rethought in a manner that brings them back into accord with human nature and experience so that they may again truly serve the human good. By engaging both the history of rights in the West and the multicultural challenge of rights in an international context, Rethinking Rights offers a provocative and coherent new argument to advance the field of rights studies.
Volume II of The Rights Retained by the People explores how the Ninth Amendment affects the proper way of interpreting the Constitution as a whole. Contributors: Sotirios A. Barber, Michael W. McConnell, Sanford Levinson, Stephen Macedo, Andrzej Rapacznski, Thomas C. Grey, Lawrence G. Sager, Morris S. Arnold, Earl M. Maltz, Susanna Sherry, Calvin R. Massey, Thomas McAffee and Raoul Berger. Together with Volume I, which covers primarily the history and proper interpretation of the amendment itself, these books constitute the definitive reference work on the Ninth Amendment.
Property rights are the rules governing ownership in society. This Element offers an analytical framework to understand the origins and consequences of property rights. It conceptualizes of the political economy of property rights as a concern with the follow questions: What explains the origins of economic and legal property rights? What are the consequences of different property rights institutions for wealth creation, conservation, and political order? Why do property institutions change? Why do legal reforms relating to property rights such as land redistribution and legal titling improve livelihoods in some contexts but not others? In analyzing property rights, the authors emphasize the complementarity of insights from a diversity of disciplinary perspectives, including Austrian economics, public choice, and institutional economics, including the Bloomington School of institutional analysis and political economy.
By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.
This is an excerpt from the 4-volume dictionary of economics, a reference book which aims to define the subject of economics today. 1300 subject entries in the complete work cover the broad themes of economic theory. This extract concentrates on the theory of the invisible hand.
A fresh, innovative, thought provoking look at the development of copyright law as it pertains to creativity and one that will give even the most experienced reader fresh insight into this tangled area of law. The author s language ability (German, English, French) and interdisciplinary background (law and music) combine to enable him to add significant analytical depth to the subject. A must read in a time when our creative industries are being called upon to help re-build our shattered economy. Charlotte Waelde, University of Exeter, UK Professor Rahmatian is perhaps uniquely placed to offer a complete rethinking of the nature and function of copyright. Working with original materials in original languages, he spans the continental and common law traditions in a breathtaking synthesis of the varied justifications and uses (or misuses) of the concept of creativity as property. Paul J. Heald, University of Georgia, US Copyright and Creativity discusses the making of property out of creative works through the legal mechanism of copyright. It shows the manner in which the law translates a great variety of expressions of the human mind into its normative system and transforms them into the property right of copyright or droit d auteur. This timely book examines the proprietary features of copyright, the inherent limitations of its powers, and its justification and relationship to the non-proprietary realm of the public domain. The final parts of the book deal with the propertisation/commodification of human authors themselves through their works as alienable objects of property, the well-known Romantic author critique as a sophisticated justification of that commodification, and at an international level, neo-feudal and neo-colonial developments as a result of this process. This detailed study will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, legal sociologists, and specialists in copyright, property theory, or legal theory and political philosophy with particular interest in property theory. Practitioners within bodies involved in legal policy, organisations concerned with law reform, European institutions, and international organisations will also find much to interest them in this book.
