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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Is The Concept Of The Person Necessary For Human Rights?, Jens David Ohlin
Is The Concept Of The Person Necessary For Human Rights?, Jens David Ohlin
Jens David Ohlin
The concept of the person is widely assumed to be indispensable for making a rights claim. But a survey of the concept's appearance in legal discourse reveals that the concept is stretched to the breaking point. Personhood stands at the center of debates as diverse as the legal status of embryos and animals to the rights and responsibilities of corporations and nations. This Note analyzes the evidence and argues that personhood is a cluster concept with distinct components: the biological concept of the human being, the notion of a rational agent, and unity of consciousness. This suggests that it is …
Human Persons, Human Rights, And The Distributive Structure Of Global Justice, Robert C. Hockett
Human Persons, Human Rights, And The Distributive Structure Of Global Justice, Robert C. Hockett
Robert C. Hockett
It is common for economically oriented transnational legal theorists to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. It is less common for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. Moreover, we effectively define ourselves and our fellow humans by reference to that which we equalize. For it is in virtue of the latter that our global welfare formulations treat us as "counting" for purposes of globally aggregating and maximizing. To analyze maximization language on the one hand, and equalization and identification language …
Punitive Injunctions, Nirej S. Sekhon