Public Rights, Private Relations

Jean Thomas is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. After her JD (Juris Doctor) studies at the University of Toronto, she completed her JSD (Doctor of Juridicial Science) at New York University. She has been a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford's McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. Thomas's research centres on questions of legal theory, rights theory in particular, and on interdisciplinary questions of legal, political, and moral philosophy.

• Introduction ; 1. Setting the Scene ; 2. Moral Argument and Positive Law: A Method for Constructing a Model of Rights ; 3. Duelling Concepts in Rights Theory ; 4. Constraint and Value ; 5. A Model of Rights: From Rights Theory to Pubilc Law ; 6. Indeterminacy ; 7. Relationality in the Model of Rights ; 8. Relational Normativity ; 9. Relations of Dependency and the Model of Rights ; 10. The Model of Rights in Practice ; Conclusion

Public Rights, Private Relations is a work of great scope, imagination, and intelligence. By focusing upon certain bedrock theoretical commitments, along with some of the most fundamental and widespread elements of our public law practices, Thomas has crafted a consensus-driven model of public law rights.