Rights and Reason

This is the most important collection of essays on rights theory to appear in the last decade. Most essays are published here for the first time. The collection honors the eminent rights theorist, Carl Wellman, on the occasion of his retirement. Stimulated by Wellman's extensive writings on rights, the newly written essays here address such topics as the grounding of rights, the universality of rights, conflict among legal rights, the nature of political rights, the care-based presuppositions of rights, the misuse of rights talk, the connection between rights and religion, and the rights of cultural minorities, as well as related issues concerning the foundations of morality and the nature of justice. Contributors include: Alice Erh-Soon Tay, Joel Feinberg, James Griffin, P.M.S. Hacker, Virginia Held, Hermann Klenner, Neil MacCormick, Rex Martin, Diana Meyers, Gerald Postema, Joseph Raz, L. Wayne Sumner, G.H. Von Wright, and Jeremy Waldron, with an introduction by Christopher Wellman. Aimed at researchers, scholars, graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the fields of philosophy, law, human rights and political theory.