NEW ANALYSIS OF HUMAN RIGHTS BY FTB BARRISTER AND ACADEMIC

The enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 has opened up new challenges for British public law. The courts have responded with a careful analysis of the Act and the Strasbourg case law, but questions about the nature and scope of these rights remain.

Considering that such questions are both legal and philosophical in nature, legal academic and practising barrister Pavlos Eleftheriadis offers in Legal Rights a general discussion of the idea of rights in law. He follows some recent judicial pronouncements in seeking the foundation of the theory of rights not in statutory law but in the structural features of the common law constitution. He outlines an argument according to which basic public law rights are an essential component of the institutional framework of the rule of law or what classical political philosophy called 'the civil condition'. His arguments will be of interest to all theoretically minded public lawyers.

Pavlos Eleftheriadis is a Fellow in Law at Mansfield College, University of Oxford and an academic member of FTB. Legal Rights is published by Oxford University Press.