Legal History Commons^™

From Human Rights To Fundamental Rights: On The Consequences Of A Conceptual Distinction, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article introduces a peculiar distinction between "human" rights and "fundamental" rights, explaining through diverse areas, the role that the difference can play. Rights are loaded with contrasting properties and burdens, opposing features and values (neutral, pre-political, negotiable, democratic, etc.). On the contrary, we should accept - on one side - human rights as moral visions of what is due to human beings, deontological imperatives, even if abstract. But on the other side we cannot ignore the ethical problems: e.g. those resulting from their blind implementation. We need to enhance the institutional, legal and ethical-political meaning of "fundamental" rights, i.e. …

Rights As Norms And As Ends, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article considers the narratives of law through the lens of the form-substance devide. Different legal theories have provided for opposite definitions of law, legal rules and individual rights, enhancing their identity as due to some substantive content or, on the contrary, to some formal-functional features. The form-substance antinomy reflects both institutional and theoretical reasons. It bears down on the relations envisaged among rights, norms and ends. Different conceptions of rights are best understood as a special articulation of those three terms, and offer different patterns for rights, depending on their relation-opposition with collective ends, ethical values, legislation. The following …

Reasons For Justice, Rights And Future Generations, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article focuses on some very "fundamental threats" to future generations' leaving, and considers whether most essential interests of future persons not to be harmed can be construed as rights, and in particular as human rights, as much as present persons'. The framework refers essentially to a conceptual grammar of justice. Moreover, it is suggested to articulate rights through the lens of "disposability" and "non-disposability" principles. Finally, the article shows the reasons for separating what we owe to future persons under the challenge of those threats for humanity, i.e. a matter of justice, from our right to hand down our …

The Abuse Of Rights And The Rule Of Law, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

This article deals with the abuse that can be committed in the name of rights and of the rule of law, not against them. It explains the general characteristics of the concept of abuse from a legal point of view, on the part of the holder of a public power or of a right. Moreover, it addresses the way to identify the abuse itself by the means of legal arguments, and principles. Finally, it shows how resorting to the problem of abuse of power has been used as a tool for recognizing the habeas corpus to detainees in Guantanamo by …

Arguments In Favour Of A Functional Theory Of Fundamental Rights, Gianluigi Palombella

Gianluigi Palombella

The article suggests a relational concept of fundamental rights. This concept

enhances the «functional» rôle played by some of the rights in the system of a state

governed by the rule of law, rather than an ethical universality or a substantial content

coinciding with any list of «human» rights. Fundamental rights belong to the fundamental

(ideal, substantice and normative) criteria of recognition/selection of actions and norms in

the institutional/normative practice of a legal order. Given this premise, the work analyses

some relevant issues: universal-fundamental nexus, property rights, liberty rights, social

rights. Fundamental rights refuse any rigid classification which identifies and …