Rights: Concepts and Contexts

With approaches ranging from the political to the historical, and from the analytical to the critical, this collection touches on the major conceptual and practical questions of this important field: What is the nature and grounding of human rights? How should conflicts of rights best be analyzed?

Rights: Concepts and Contexts contains the central works of recent scholarship on the nature of rights, with contributions by some of the most prominent contemporary theorists in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, Jeremy Waldron, Morton Horwitz, Stephen Darwall, Margaret Gilbert, David Lyons, and Aharon Barak. With approaches ranging from the political to the historical, and from the analytical to the critical, this collection touches on the major conceptual and practical questions of this important field: what is the nature and grounding of human rights? How should conflicts of rights best be analyzed? Are rights best understood in terms of choice, benefits, or some hybrid of the two? What are the connections between rights and duties, and between rights and justice? The collection also offers useful introductions to emerging issues in rights theory such as the purported bipolarity of rights.