In a departure from the mainstream methodology of a positivist-oriented jurisprudence, Collective Rights provides the first legal-theoretical treatment of this area. It advances a normative-moral standpoint of 'value collectivism' which goes against the traditional political philosophy of liberalism and the dominant ideas of liberal multiculturalism. Moreover, it places a theoretical account of collective rights within the larger debate between proponents of different rights theories. By exploring why 'collective rights' should be differentiated from similar legal concepts, the relationship between collective and (...) individual rights and why groups should be recognised as the third distinctive type of right-holders, it presents the topic as connected to the larger philosophical debate about international law of human rights, most notably to the problem of universality of rights. (shrink)

The first part of the paper focuses on the current debate over the universality of human rights. After conceptually distinguishing between different types of universality, it employs Sen’s definition that the claim of a universal value is the one that people anywhere may have reason to see as valuable. When applied to human rights, this standard implies “thin” (relative, contingent) universality, which might be operationally worked-out as in Donnelly’s three-tiered scheme of concepts–conceptions–implementations. The second part is devoted to collective rights, (...) which have recently become a new topic of the human rights debate. This part provides the basis of political–philosophical justification and legal–theoretical conceptualization of collective rights, as rights directly vested in collective entities. The third part dwells on the problem of universality of collective rights. It differentiates between the three main collective entities in international law—peoples, minorities, and indigenous peoples—and investigates whether certain rights vested in these collectives might, according to Sen’s standard, acquire the status of the universal ones. After determining that some rights are, in principle, plausible candidates for such a status in international law, this paper concludes by taking notice of a number of the open issues that still need to be settled, primarily by the cooperative endeavor of international legal scholars and legal theorists. (shrink)

The second Yearbook of the Central East European Forum of Young Legal, Political and Social Theorists aims at reassessing some major legacies of jurisprudence and political philosophy, thereby celebrating one hundred years from the publication of the first important theoretical account of Hans Kelsen - Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre; the fifty-years anniversary of one of the most important contemporary books in legal theory - Herbert Hart's The Concept of Law; as well as the forty-years heritage of the most influential 20th century (...) account of justice - John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. On this occasion fourteen scholars from Eastern and Central Europe gave their accounts and interpretations of jurisprudential and political philosophical problems that persist or emerge anew in contemporary debates. (shrink)

Jurisprudence has up until recently largely neglected international law as a subject of philosophizing. The Nature of International Law tries to offset against this deficiency by providing a comprehensive explanatory account of international law. It does so within an analytical tradition, albeit within the one which departs from the nowadays dominant method of the metaphysically-driven conceptual analysis. Instead, it adopts the prototype theory of concepts, which is directed towards determining typical features constitutive of the nature of international law. The book's (...) central finding is that those features are: normativity, institutionalization, coercive guaranteeing, and justice-aptness. Since typical features are context sensitive, their specificities at the international level are further elucidated. The book, finally, challenges the often raised claim that fragmentation is international law's unique feature by demonstrating that international institutional actors, particularly adjudicative ones, largely perceive themselves as officials of a unified legal order. (shrink)