On September 6, 1884, three British seamen were arrested at the port of Falmouth and charged with the murder of the fourth member of their crew while adrift in a dinghy in the South Atlantic. On June 16, 1987, George Washington University Hospital sought a declaratory order from the District of Columbia Superior Court instructing the hospital whether to perform a Caesarean section on Angela Carder, a young woman in her twenty-sixth week of pregnancy who was dying of lung cancer. These two seemingly unrelated events have much to tell us about the changing concept of rights in Anglo-American jurisprudence. For, each gave rise to a case whose resolution required a court to construe the fundamental rights of the parties involved; and, in each case, the construction of these rights was literally a matter of life and death. Yet a radically different conception of rights emerged from each. For this reason, these cases are ideally designed to illustrate just how much the legal conception of a fundamental right has changed over the last century
From Cannibalism to Caesareans: Two Conceptions of Fundamental Rights
From Cannibalism to Caesareans: Two Conceptions of Fundamental Rights
Recent Publications
- “Equal Opportunity, Not Reparations” in the Handbook of Equality of Opportunity (2024)
- “A Bayesian Solution to Hallsson’s Puzzle”
- Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests, 2nd Edition
- “Optimizing political influence: a jury theorem with dynamic competence and dependence”
- Why not anarchism?
Recent News
- Advocacy group concerned pay-for-plasma clinics expanding to Ontario will hurt voluntary donations
- Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore, Debating Democracy (University of Zurich’s UBS Center, 2024)
- Jason Brennan “Everything Wrong with Democracy” on the Alex O’Connor Podcast (January 28, 2024)
- On the affirmative action ruling, the Supreme Court got it half right
- Is the effective altruism movement in trouble?