Rights come in various types - human, moral, civil, political and legal - and claims about who has a right, and to what, are often contested. What are rights? Are they timeless and universal, or merely conventional? How are they related to other morally significant values, such as well-being, autonomy, and community? Can animals have rights? Or fetuses? Do we have a right to do as we please so long as we do not harm others? This is the only accessible (...) and readable introduction to the history, logic, moral implications, and political tendencies of the idea of rights. It is organized chronologically and discusses important events, such as the French Revolution. As an undergraduate text it is well-suited to introductions to political philosophy, moral philosophy, and ethics. It could also be used in courses on political theory in departments of political science and government, and in courses on legal theory in law schools. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals.

In this contribution I address the type of emergency that threatens a state’s monopoly of violence, meaning that the state’s competence to provide citizens with elementary security is challenged. The question is, whether actions taken by the state to ward off these threats (should) fall within the ambit of the criminal law. A central problem is the indeterminacy that is inherent in the state of emergency, implicating that adequate measures as well as constitutional constraints to be imposed on such measures (...) cannot easily be determined in advance. This indeterminacy raises two interrelated issues. Firstly, the issue of whether it makes sense to speak of criminal jurisdiction when the existing jurisdiction is challenged as such. To what extent does the indeterminacy call for inherently unlimited powers of the state, implying there can be no such thing as criminal jurisdiction during a state of emergency? Second—if criminal jurisdiction is not in contradiction with the state of emergency—the issue of what criminal liability could mean in such a state needs to be confronted. To what extent does the indeterminacy inherent in the state of emergency jeopardise criminal liability because such indeterminacy engenders severe legal uncertainty regarding the standards against which the relevant actions are to be judged? Both issues will be discussed from the perspective of constitutional democracy, assuming that what is at stake in times of emergency is both the competence to sustain the monopoly of violence and the possibility to constrain the powers of the state. (shrink)

Privacy, Due process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology engages with the rapidly developing computational aspects of our world including data mining, behavioural advertising, iGovernment, profiling for intelligence, customer relationship management, smart search engines, personalized news feeds, and so on in order to consider their implications for the assumptions on which our legal framework has been built. The contributions to this volume focus on the issue of privacy, which is often equated with data (...) privacy and data security, location privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, unobservability, and unlinkability. Here, however, the extent to which predictive and other types of data analytics operate in ways that may or may not violate privacy is rigorously taken up, both technologically and legally, in order to open up new possibilities for considering, and contesting, how we are increasingly being correlated and categorizedin relationship with due process – the right to contest how the profiling systems are categorizing and deciding about us. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct the historical significance of the concept of sovereignty and I defend its relevance against the critique of Hannah Arendt. I argue that sovereignty, understood as the concept that expresses the normative unity of the legal order, is not incompatible with plurality and constitutionalism and that it was the condition for the formation of inter state law. Further I criticize the abstract moralism that characterizes today's cosmopolitanism and the paradigm of global governance. Although the significance of (...) sovereignty is shifting in the context of globalisation, it is not becoming irrelevant because it symbolizes the right of political self-determination of a community as well as the capacity to transfer some portion of its regulatory competence to a supra-national legal order. (shrink)