Eleanor Curran, Rethinking Rights: Historical Development and Philosophical Justification (2022). Eleanor Curran’s excellent book, Rethinking Rights, surveys the philosophy of legal rights, its history and current importance. The book’s purpose is ‘to examine the history of rights theory and the effects of that history and how it has been written, on how philosophers think about rights today …’ (p xiii). Thus the book concerns, not a theory of rights, but a theory of rights theory. The book examines a number of modern theories of rights, in particular the analysis of rights due to WN Hohfeld. This analysis is employed as a means of investigating historical conceptions of rights, especially that of Hobbes; the author claims that the analysis at best only partially captures Hobbes’s sense of ‘right’ … (more)
[Sean Coyle, JOTWELL, 1 March 2023]
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