Fundamental Rights, Capabilities, and Private Legal Relationships

Abstract

The previously controversial claim of the horizontal effects of fundamental rights on private legal relationships is now widely acknowledged in Europe. This paper submits that this legal development can be understood as the judicial interpretation of fundamental rights as capabilities. What people are really able to do and be depends in important ways on the rights and obligations that originate in relationships with other private parties. This paper aims to show that the horizontal effect of fundamental rights in private law is a paradigm of what the protection of capabilities would require.