Sep 18, 2020

Rights at the Margins

Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives

Jonathan Robinson

Hosted by Alexandra Ortolja-Baird

Summary

The essays in Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Brill) explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society.

By tracing pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’ back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or today’s immigration and border control, this volume invites its readers to consider whether individual rights were in fact, or at least in theory, available to the marginalized.

By focusing not only on the economically impoverished but also those who were disenfranchised because of disability, gender, race, religion or infidelity, this book also sheds light on the relationship between the early history of individual rights and social justice at the margins.

Jonathan Robinson, Ph.D. (2010) in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. He currently acts as a lawyer and is the author of William of Ockham’s Theory of Property Rights in Context (Brill, 2012).

Virpi Mäkinen is Senior Lecturer in Theological and Social Ethics at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Pamela Slotte is Associate Professor of Minority Studies at the Åbo Akademi University, Finland.

Heikki Haara is Senior Lecturer of Political History at the University of Helsinki.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London