Rights: Legal Aspects

Abstract

Intellectual discourse about rights traditionally has been articulated within and between the deductive enterprises of political and moral philosophy on the one hand, and jurisprudence and legal theory on the other. More recently, theoretically informed empirical social science has made its own distinctive contributions to a fuller understanding of legal rights by broadening academic inquiry to rights practices in varying social contexts. This article addresses these new research developments, but it begins with the traditional iterations of rights in philosophy and law. Going back to the intellectual roots of rights inquiry is important, not only in order to provide a more comprehensive picture, but also because all three approaches to rights—the philosophical, the jurisprudential, and the social scientific—are inextricably, if uncomfortably, entangled with one another. They share not only a core definition of rights but continue, each in its own way, to influence rights practice and rights discourse.