View Of Rights Research Articles

Justice vis à vis welfare: how Austrian welfare economics should fit in the Austro-libertarian framework

The present work calls for a modification of Austrian welfare economics so that it should be given a distinct role within the Austro-libertarian paradigm. To this end, we clearly distinguish between justice and welfare. We proceed by trying to stick to the spirit of Austro-libertarianism as firmly as possible. In particular, we operate within the universe of voluntary (viz. rights-respecting) exchanges, having assumed the libertarian absolutist side-constraints view of rights. Furthermore, we take for granted the Austrian actual preference satisfaction view. The specific purpose of the present paper is two-fold. First, we subject Austrian rights-based welfare economics to critical scrutiny. Concluding that the above theory begs the question in favor of free market, we assert that to gauge market efficiency we need to resort to some descriptive criterion, which could reasonably be deemed constitutive of welfare. And it is only then that the question of market efficiency is an open question.

The Regulation of Planetary Health Challenges: A Co-Benefits Approach for AMR and WASH

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a global public health challenge. It has been examined through various angles, but the link between AMR and access to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) or lack thereof has received little attention. Both AMR and WASH relate directly to the realization of the rights to health, water, and sanitation. In addition, both can affect the enjoyment of the right to environment. AMR is particularly complex from a rights perspective. Access to medicines contributes significantly to the realization of the right to health. At the same time, AMR affects the poorer sections of society who have disproportionately less access to medicines and to WASH. Rights, equality and justice should thus be at the centre of the development and implementation of law and policy concerning AMR and WASH. As we celebrate 50 years of international environmental law, it is crucial to ask some hard questions concerning the inter-sectional and cross-sectoral dimensions of AMR and WASH from the point of view of rights, equality, and justice. Linking the two would bring various co-benefits that the prevailing silo mentality has prevented.

The Emergence of Neutrality

This Article traces two interwoven jurisprudential genealogies. The first of these focuses on the emergence of neutrality in speech and press doctrine. Content and viewpoint neutrality are now the bedrock principles of modern First Amendment law. Yet the history of these concepts is largely untold and otherwise misunderstood. Scholars usually assume that expressive-freedom doctrine was mostly undeveloped before the early twentieth century and that neutrality was central to its modern rebirth. But this view distorts and sometimes even inverts historical perspectives. For most of American history, the governing paradigm of expressive freedom was one of limited toleration, protecting speech within socially defined boundaries. And the modern embrace of content and viewpoint neutrality, it turns out, occurred only in the 1960s as the Supreme Court merged earlier strands of rights jurisprudence in novel ways. The emergence of neutrality, this Article shows, was more gradual, more contested, and more contingent than we now assume. Recovering this history exposes the novelty of the modern neutrality paradigm, and it casts new light on the history of other First Amendment concepts, like prior restraints, low-value speech, and overbreadth. To understand these developments, it is necessary to trace a second doctrinal genealogy focusing on the very idea of fundamental rights. Older views of expressive freedom, this Article reveals, were embedded in a different conceptual framework for thinking about rights. And once again, the role of neutrality was radically different. Today, neutrality is ubiquitous in rights discourse, reflecting the prevailing view that rights are domains in which people can make their own moral choices. Thus defined, rights need not be absolute, but they at least demand governmental neutrality with respect to values—a view that is reinforced by the undesirable alternative of judges defining non-neutral boundaries. Yet this neutrality-based view of rights also emerged well into the twentieth century, reflecting a transmogrified synthesis of earlier ideas. Recovering these older paradigms powerfully illustrates how deeply our own perspective shapes the way that we view the Constitution. Things that appear natural when reading the First Amendment, it turns out, are refracted through a distinctively modern lens. Integrating history into modern rights jurisprudence thus poses a substantial and unresolved challenge, warranting further engagement by scholars and judges.

Decolonizing Feminism Through Intersectional Praxis

Transnational feminism should have normative force and be anti‐imperialist. This article addresses the possibility of an anti‐imperialist transnational feminism in conversation with Serene Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism. Khader argues that the key to an anti‐imperialist feminism is separating universalism from the features that result in imperialism, such as ethnocentrism and justice monism. This article shares Khader’s commitment to anti‐imperialist feminism and further explores three relevant issues: human rights, the definition of feminism, and economic justice. It proposes a decolonizing view of rights that advocates a critical examination of their uses, applications, and origins. It argues that transnational feminism should engage with issues of economic justice. And it proposes that feminism as an intersectional praxis should include normative dimensions in addition to antisexism, such as antiracism and economic justice.

Normative intersectionality in married women's property rights in southern Nigeria

ABSTRACT The fate of marriage gifts during a customary law divorce is significant for the interaction of legal orders in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the context of scholars' fixation with conflict of laws. In analysing this fatet, this article introduces normative intersectionality as a theoretical framework for a nuanced understanding of how laws and socio-economic forces interact in post-colonial settings. Normative intersectionality rejects a legal positivist view of rights, which neglects people's adaptation of indigenous norms to socioeconomic changes. In this sense, normative intersectionality is useful for addressing the traditional Igbo law of matrimonial property, which regards a married woman's property rights as subsumed in her husband's rights. Using the division of marriage gifts in Southern Nigeria as a case study, the article draws attention to how legal orders speak to, rather than against, each other, and in so doing, stresses the adaptive character of indigenous laws. It argues that normative intersectionality illumines the interplay of gender equality, property rights and legal pluralism. Accordingly, it urges judges to use the imitative nature of legal pluralism in post-colonial settings to remedy entrenched systems of injustice and inequality, which often hide under the banner of tradition. Keywords: Adaptive legal pluralism, marriage gifts, African customary law, matrimonial property rights.

Greek University Students and the Smoke-Free Law: Learning about Rights and Duties in a Community of Practice

This paper is about Greek university students’ violation of the smoking law in public venues and their understanding of rights, duties and responsibilities. Thirty-one students (21 smokers) were interviewed and asked to describe and discuss their own and other students’ behaviour in relation to smoking in closed public places in terms of rights and duties. Additional material from the printed and electronic press has been used to provide a context to the students’ statements. Participant-smokers’ systematic violations of the smoke-free law spring from a peculiar view of rights, duties and responsibilities. Both behaviour and its theoretical underpinnings are reinforced in the context of the students’ leisure time “community of practice.” All those involved, that is, cafe owners/staff, customers and law-enforcers, contribute to encouraging smoking by rewarding those who violate the law and discouraging law-abiding behaviours. The authorities in charge usually avoid monitoring public venues for transgressions, which reduces to a minimum the danger of being caught and sanctioned. Cafe owners/staff tolerate smoking, which is interpreted as informal permission. Smokers invoke both customers’ behaviour and the staff’s tolerance as a justification for their own violations of the law. The paper ends with considerations about the status of school knowledge: somewhat weak if compared to the compelling authority of the informal knowledge people acquire in everyday interactions.

Human rights\u2019 interdependence and indivisibility: a glance over the human rights to water and sanitation

BackgroundIn 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drawn up. The content of this document was further reflected two treaties, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. To try to maintain the interrelationship between the rights contained in each document, the idea that all rights are interdependent and indivisible was stressed. Based on this vision, this study aimed to explore the extent to which the violation of the human rights to water and sanitation interferes with the guarantee of other rights, addressing the principles of interdependence and indivisibility.MethodsFor that, 24 homeless, in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, were interviewed. Individual and group interviews were carried out in addition to participant observation. The content analysis was used in order to analyze the data collected.ResultsThe research found that violation of the rights to water and sanitation promotes violation of other rights, such as health and education rights, strengthening the view of rights’ interdependence and indivisibility.ConclusionIt is important to affirm that the protection of human rights must be consolidated at an operational and normative level, aligned to concepts of indivisibility and interdependence as it has been proposed for approximately seven decades.

Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty by William Davenport Mercer

Reviewed by: Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty by William Davenport Mercer Franklin Sammons (bio) KEY WORDS U.S Constitution, Bill of Rights, John Marshall, Barron v. Baltimore, Individual rights, Property rights Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty. By William Davenport Mercer. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. 296. Cloth, $34.95.) In February of 1833, an aged John Marshall delivered the final decision of his 34-year career on the U.S. Supreme Court: in Barron v. Baltimore, he effectively ruled that the Bill of Rights did not apply to state or local governments. Marshall’s judgement in Barron has puzzled scholars for two primary reasons. First, by restricting the applicability of the Bill of Rights to the federal government, the decision deviated from much of Marshall’s earlier jurisprudence that had used the Court to uphold or expand federal power. Second, Marshall’s disregard for natural-law arguments was out of sync with the prevailing practices of state and federal courts considering issues of individual rights at the time. William Davenport Mercer’s informative and well-researched study, Diminishing the Bill of Rights: Barron v. Baltimore and the Foundations of American Liberty, demystifies the Barron ruling by tracing its path to the Supreme Court and illuminating the historical conditions that shaped Marshall’s decision. Mercer’s book, the first devoted to Barron, joins a growing list of monographs that reconstruct the historical–legal context from which a single Supreme Court case arose, progressed, and was decided to better comprehend the case and its significance.1 [End Page 353] Barron’s genesis lay in the muddy streets of Fell’s Point, a gritty section of early nineteenth-century Baltimore that suffered from bad drainage. In 1815, John Barron, Jr. and John Craig, two ambitious middling merchants, purchased a wharf in Fell’s Point. Almost immediately they encountered a slew of problems: High construction costs, severe weather, pressing debts, and harmful stormwater debris threatened the viability of their investment. These troubles were exacerbated in 1817 when the city expanded efforts to manage these drainage problems by paving streets and constructing embankments. While benefiting some residents, the improvements injured Barron and Craig by routing the stormwater and emptying its contents near their wharf, making the surrounding area less navigable and damaging their property. After failing to obtain redress through petitions, Barron and Craig filed suit in 1822, claiming the city had taken their property without compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Mercer shows how a dispute over drainage and property damage was part of a broader discussion about the nature and origins of rights in the early United States. Economic development—and municipal efforts to direct it—intensified these debates because they often pitted the prerogatives of civic improvement against the property rights of individuals. Questions about the city’s “power to spend city funds, take property, or otherwise infringe on the rights of individual residents” loomed large (33). Mercer provides rich context for the legal debates surrounding Barron by surveying some of the era’s most influential theorists of rights and property alongside a variety of antebellum state court cases. His thoughtful exposition of writings by William Blackstone, James Kent, and St. George Tucker, to name just a few, demonstrates one of his most important claims: During this period, no dominant interpretation of the source of individual rights prevailed because jurists understood them to be founded in a complicated blend of common-law presumptions, natural rights, and constitutional texts. Barron and Craig’s lawyers drew upon this expansive conception of rights to argue the case in the Maryland state court and the appeals court in Annapolis. However, when the case finally reached the Supreme Court, Marshall ignored this variegated understanding of rights and instead “enunciated a view of rights as emanating from written documents” (151). In its brief decision to dismiss the case, the Court unanimously ruled that the Fifth Amendment did not apply to the states because the text of the Constitution did not explicitly say that it did. [End Page 354] Mercer contends that by framing the decision in this...

Criticism on the Structure and Standards of the ‘Interest-Balancing’ - ocused on the Constitutional Decision on Abortion:2010 Hun-Ba402 Case -

여성의 낙태권은 법철학적으로 볼 때 권리의 선택설의 입장에서 개인의 자기결정권을 근거로 정당화되어 왔다. 그러나 여성들의 낙태권은 자신의 ‘선택’에 대한 불가침적 보호로 충분히 설명될 수 없으며, 오늘날 여성 인권 혹은 시민권의 일부로 이해되는 재생산권의 성격을 가진다. 재생산에 대한 공동체 전체의 책임이라는 관점에서, 여성의 낙태권은 여성의 이익과 불이익을 실질적으로 고려하는 논의가 필요하다. 아울러 본 연구는 낙태죄 위헌판단의 이익형량 구조 및 내용 분석을 통해, 헌법재판소의 법익 균형성 판단 방식을 비판적으로 검토한다. 특히 헌법재판소의 위헌판단에서 나타난 태아의 생명권과 임부의 자기결정권의 충돌 프레임은 법원리의 충돌과 이익형량의 개방적 구조라는 측면에서 볼 때, 일종의 범주 오류를 범하는 것이다. 헌법재판소는 임부의 구체적인 이익과 불이익을 최대한 고려하여, 태아의 생명보호라는 추상적 이익에 의한 기본권 제한을 쉽게 용인하지 말아야 한다. 왜냐하면 헌법재판소의 낙태죄 위헌여부 결정은 구체적 개인의 권리를 찾는 과정이며, 낙태 규제 방식 및 생명 보호에 관한 입법 정책적 고려와는 구별되어야 하기 때문이다.Women s abortion rights have been justified on the basis of an individual s right to self-determination in the light of the philosophical view of rights. Women s abortion claims, however, can not be adequately explained by inviolable protection of their ‘choices’ and have the nature of reproductive rights, which are understood as part of women s human rights or citizenship. In view of the collective responsibility for reproduction, the abortion rights of the pregnant women should be more considered according to women s interests and disadvantages. In addition, this study critically reviews on the 2012 Korean Constitutional decision on the Crime of Abortion. In particular, an improper setting of the framework based on the conflict of the right of the fetus’ life versus the right of mother’s self-determination is examined. The Constitutional Court should not allow the limitation of basic rights by the abstract interest of protecting the life of the fetus, taking into account the specific interests and disadvantages of the pregnant women. Because the Constitutional Court s decision is a process of looking for specific individuals rights and should be distinguished from the legislative policy consideration of abortion regime and life protection.

LA EDUCACIÓN SEXUAL: COMO MÉTODO PARA LA PREVENCIÓN DE EMBARAZOS NO DESEADOS EN EL BACHILLERATO

This article discusses the importance of sexual education, revealing statistical data about the early sexual life of adolescent adolescents, the objective is to analyze the causes that motivate unwanted pregnancy, scientifically substantiating the context, content and areas of sexual education. The bibliographic, field and descriptive research was used as a methodology, surveying 76 students of the first year of the baccalaureate level of the Blanca Martinez de Tinajero Educational Unit, which allowed to know the opinions and attitudes of the subject. The causes of unwanted pregnancies are poor sexual education. Students consider their parents to be the ones who must give information. Educational institutions should pro-pose an integrative model, encompassing the understanding of psychological, emotional, physical and mental aspects, focusing on the exercise of sexuality from the point of view of rights, gender, personal development.

Administering solidarity: grassroots welfare in post-debt crisis Greece

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine what happens as the state relinquishes welfare provision to volunteers. Attending to the ethnographic reality of such practices, to the collection, storage, allocation, and distribution of assistance, it explores how the impetus to address poverty is transformed through the process of administering it.Design/methodology/approachResearch was based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork volunteering at a solidarity organization in Athens.FindingsAdministering solidarity, volunteers were confronted with practical, logistic problems. Attempting to resolve these, they resorted to technical, administrative devices. Yet through these efforts, the volunteers systematized not only their activities, but also their view of rights themselves. Solidarity ethics were subtly transformed into values of fairness, efficiency, and impartiality. As a result, the help they offered became impersonal and material, omitting the political dimensions of their work.Originality/valueThis paper applies insights from ethnographies of humanitarian organization that emphasize the material, embodied qualities of moral labour. Doing so, it illustrates how seemingly benign practices, such as administration, have fundamentally ethical qualities.

The Rights of Future Persons under Attack: Correlativity in the Non-Identity Problem

This paper aims at answering some of the objections to the NIP’s criticism of the idea of rights of future persons. Those objections usually adopt different perspectives depending on how they understand differently the nature of the correlativity between rights and duties – some adopt a present-rights-of-future-persons view, others a future-rights-of-future-persons view, others a transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view, and others still an eternalist view of rights and persons. The paper will try to show that only a non-transitive present-rights-of-present-persons view can survive the challenges posed by the notion of correlativity inherent in the NIP, and thus preserve rights language when discussing the future. This view is proved also more suitable for the legal and political realms, where policies and law-making are usually more concerned with present addressees and short term effects.

Towards a More Particularist View of Rights\u2019 Stringency

For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’ (Raz in The Morality of Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, p. 192), making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’ (Miller, in Cruft, Liao, Renzo (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is not to prove that the traditional view of rights’ stringency is necessarily false, nor even that we have no good reason to believe it is true. Rather, my aim is only to show that we have good reason to think that the foundation of the traditional position is less stable than we might have otherwise supposed and that an alternative conception of rights—one which takes the stringency of any given right as particular to the kind of right it is—is both viable and attractive. In short, to begin to move us towards a more ‘particularist’ conception of rights’ standing in moral reasoning and judgement.

Beyond Rights and Welfare: Democracy, Dialogue, and the Animal Welfare Act

The primary frameworks through which scholars have conceptualized legal protections for animals—animal “rights” and animal “welfare”—do not account for socio-legal transformation or democratic dialogue as central dynamics of animal law. The animal “rights” approach focuses on the need for limits or boundaries preventing animal use, while the animal “welfare” approach advocates balancing harm to animals against human benefits from animal use. Both approaches rely on abstract accounts of the characteristics animals are thought to share with humans and the legal protections they are owed as a result of those traits. Neither offers sustained attention to the dynamics of legal change in democratic states, including the importance of public access to the facts of animal lives, opportunities for affective storytelling, and multi-faceted public deliberation. This Article offers an alternative avenue for theorizing animal legal protections, drawing on Laurence Tribe’s articulation of law as governed by an “evolving ethic,” wherein successive shifts in legal and public consensus build upon one another in ways that are dynamic and not entirely unpredictable. Drawing on feminist, critical, and relational approaches to law and social change, this Article elaborates a vision of animal law as governed by an evolving ethic wherein legal transformation is deeply connected to the public availability of particular facts of animal use, emotional storytelling, and broader social relationships and power dynamics. The evolving ethic here proposed helps us to shift our focus from a precritical understanding of rights as hard boundaries to a view of rights as a product of dynamic social relationships; and to shift our focus from welfarist balancing calculations to more open-textured dialogue. By conceiving of animal law through the lens of the evolving ethic, we can break free of stale debates about the virtue of rights versus welfare and instead embrace both as tools in a dialogic toolbox deployed in a field of legal transformation that is better characterized by dynamism and dialogue than by teleological advancement toward a predefined goal. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA)—the central legal regime governing the experimental use of animals in the United States, forms the central case study. The AWA regime in its current form works to foreclose public deliberation over concrete cases. The history of this same regime, however, demonstrates that affective storytelling grounded in the particular facts of animal use has been a major driver of democratic legal change protecting animals used in experiments. This Article explores the current structure and historical development of the AWA scheme, demonstrating that the evolving ethic offers insights, beyond those allowed by rights and welfare approaches, into the practical dynamics of animal law and the shortcomings of the current AWA scheme. Informed by the evolving ethic and the AWA’s history of sociolegal transformation, this Article offers AWA law reform proposals that aim to facilitate public deliberation grounded in the concrete facts of animal use—including the introduction of ethical merit review of proposed experiments, changes in the applicable rules of standing, and product labeling. While each proposed reform may yield incremental improvements in the treatment of laboratory animals in the immediate term, the core insight of the evolving ethic is that there is a distinct value in the potential of such proposals to nourish public conversations rooted in particular stories of animal use—conversations that are likely to spur new questions and new conversations, none of which can be fully determined in advance.

Innocent Threats vs Innocent Bystanders A Case Study in Rights Theory

There has been a long-running debate in moral philosophy regarding whether it is morally permissible to kill an innocent threat to save the life of an innocent victim. Rather than take a position in that debate, I argue that an innocent threat’s claim not to be killed to save an innocent victim is at least weaker than an innocent bystander’s. This has implications for just war theory. Moreover, it highlights a problem with the common view of rights, according to which rights may sometimes be infringed for the sake of achieving a lesser evil. This sort of hybrid of rights theory and consequentialism raises unnecessary problems that can be solved by adopting a different framework on rights: the Mechanics of Claims.

Relationalities and convergences in food security narratives: towards a place‐based approach

This paper addresses emerging calls for an enhanced relationality and convergence across different food security discourses. Based on a critical analysis of different narratives and concepts that have, over time, been deployed to address the food security problem, this paper asks: How, and to what extent, can the different narratives on food security and their different postulates be integrated to create a context that fosters closer connections between food system activities and more empowered relations between its actors? To address this question, the paper focuses on the governance frameworks embedded in different narratives on food security – i.e. the role attributed to different food system actors, their diverse views of rights and responsibility, and the types of interactions that are prioritised to achieve collective goals. The analysis exposes the limitations of conceptual frameworks as diverse as productivism, food sovereignty, livelihood security, the right‐to‐food, food democracy, food citizenship and community food security, which, we argue, tend to be locked into fixed levels of scale and generalised as well as oppositional assumptions. As the paper concludes, efforts to refine the food security agenda should start with a recognition of place as key and active meso‐level mediator – that is, as a progressive canvass for reassembling resources around more effective food production–consumption relations and as a multiscalar theoretical lens that offers the conceptual advantage of building far more complexity and diversity into aggregated food security debates.

Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s by Barbara J. Keys

Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s, by Barbara J. Keys. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. 362 pp. $31.50 US (cloth). Recently, historians have paid a great deal of attention to the 1970s as a decade of profound and enduring transformation. According to Charles Maier, Thomas Borstelmann, and Daniel Sargent, among others, the 1970s wrought changes that were as significant as those of any other period of the twentieth century, while Samuel Moyn has claimed that the decade gave rise to the first movement promoting global Once dismissed as an era in which nothing happened, bracketed on either side by decades in which everything seemed to have happened, scholars now regard the period between 1971 and 1980 as the origins of the globalized, neo-liberal, deindustrialized, rights-conscious world we live in today. Into this historiographical moment steps Barbara J. Keys. It is a daunting challenge, given the scholarship that has recently preceded her book, but it is one she succeeds in meeting brilliantly. Reclaiming American Virtue is an original and important book, one that makes contributions to several subfields of American and international history (for example, the histories of the Vietnam War, American politics, and rights). Using innovative methodologies, such as transnationalism and the history of emotions, Keys crafts a bracing, new historical narrative for modern America. Keys agrees with Moyn that there was no US rights movement to speak of before the mid-1970s, when the federal government began to embrace the promotion of individual rights around the world as a legitimate foreign policy goal. This conclusion rests on a particular view of what exactly constitutes human rights. For Keys and Moyn, rights means individual rights (as opposed to group rights), and the main violator of these individual rights is the state. They argue that this conception of rights as individual rights is the most widespread in the world today. Before its moment of global acceptance in the 1970s, rights was a platitude, a slogan of good intentions that governments would occasionally trot out to show their normative credentials. When activists petitioned for rights before the 1970s, they mostly sought redress for groups, usually nations but also races and ethnicities (think of the American civil rights movement), and they envisioned the state as their protector rather than as their chief antagonist. While this periodization is fairly controversial, for it airbrushes from the historical record several groups who promoted a liberal, anti-statist view of rights long before the 1970s, it is clear from Keys as well as Moyn that Washington, as well as most Americans, were uninterested in the international promotion of individual rights until the 1970s. …

THE IMAGE OF GOD, CHRISTIAN RIGHTS TALK, AND THE SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA

AbstractThe salience of rights talk in Western cultures has generated constructive responses from various religious traditions. This article contributes to this religious hermeneutic by turning to the first-generation Spanish theologians of the sixteenth-century School of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto, as important resources for Christian rights talk. These late scholastic thinkers made the image of God doctrine, as transmitted by Thomas Aquinas, the basis for affirming the worth and human natural rights of Amerindian peoples. To highlight the contemporary relevance of the school, the article engages Nicholas Wolterstorff's recent work on rights and his twofold critique of a capacities approach to human dignity and a virtues approach to justice. The School of Salamanca not only addresses the important concerns raised by Wolterstorff but uniquely offers a view of rights inextricably linked to human capacities and Christian virtue that highlights both the patient and agential dimensions of justice. They provide a critical theological challenge to the dominant secular liberal view of rights in a way that Wolterstorff's account does not.

The Issue of Ownership during Transition Period in the Former Communist Countries of Eastern Europe, as Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Albania

The issue of ownership, legal changes and legal re-conceptualization of property rights in these countries, Transition in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, as Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Albania; This study was conducted in the view of legal changes applied by countries in transition in Eastern Europe. The transition to the post-communist society did not reflect the same features and results from the point of view of property rights. Problems of ownership have been different in these countries, which relates to the way of organization of the socialist regime, and the direction of each state, in the view of the right of ownership. The form of this organization has influenced in many problems of transformation of public ownership in the process of restitution and compensation of its in private property. According to this organization some societies have passed the transition faster and smooth, while others have passed, or continue to wander through the transition more difficult and problematic. Practical Uses in these countries in respect the right of ownership, have been different, for every post-communist country. They reflect different features from one country to another and that the concept and current practices for property rights remain open for improvement in countries such as Albania to achieve the standard for European right! The question that remains open for discussion is that of identifying the factors that have contributed to the field and the differences between them, for countries in transition and property rights among post-communist societies. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p175

THE SECURITY ASPECTS OF PRISONS

Nowadays the prisons management and process control are based not only to physical security of prisons (premises, buildings, engineering equipment and technological equipment), but more to dynamic security (positive relationship between prison staff and inmates, based to rigidity and equity). The article reflects the results of the research about custodial sentence enforcement aspects of security in Latvian prisons. In this research are highlighted specificities of custodial sentence enforcement aspects of security in imprisonment places from point of view of rights of the custodial sentence enforcement law and practice. In this research are identified issues of the problem and suggested possible solutions. Within the framework of the research the norms of the Sentence Execution Code of Latvia, Prisons Administration Act and Regulations No.423 of the Cabinet of Ministers of May 30, 2006 – Internal rules of Penitentiary institutions, have been analyzed based on the safety aspects of the prison and its compliance with the requirements of generally accepted human rights, the Council of Europe and international norms and standards. Within the research the scientific literature and viewpoints from legal experts have been collected and analyzed. The aim of the research is to show, that the safety aspects of the prisons are insufficiently and inaccurately regulated and requires a deeper analysis. On the bases of this research were developed series of recommendations for prison staff to comply with the safety aspects of prisons as well as the necessity to make amendments in norms of the Sentence Execution Code of Latvia, Prisons Administration Act and Regulations No.423 of the Cabinet of Ministers of May 30, 2006 – Internal rules of Penitentiary institutions.