PLEASE NOTE TIME AND LOCATION
LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Richard Wright
Chicago-Kent College of Law
Misunderstanding Justice and Rights
Friday, October 28, 2011
1:00 - 2:30
Dining Room - Flavelle House
78 Queen’s Park
The classical conception of corrective justice and its relationship to rights and distributive justice is widely misunderstood, misrepresented, criticized and dismissed as a result of its being shorn of its moral foundation by its best known (supposed) exponents, Ernest Weinrib and Jules Coleman, who instead treat it as a merely contingent, formal, analytical construct the implementation of which is a matter of morally valid political choice. Similar routes have been taken by the more recent proponents of “rights” and “civil recourse” theories, who criticize and dismiss corrective justice for its supposed focus on remedial rights to the exclusion of primary rights while setting forth theories that provide no or minimal moral foundations for the identification and elaboration of primary rights. For theories of justice and rights to be taken seriously, there must be a recovery and renewed recognition of their being an elaboration of the basic moral principle of equal freedom as developed in the classical natural law/rights tradition.
Richard Wright is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law. He has been a visiting professor, fellow, and/or lecturer at the University of Canterbury, the University of Melbourne, the University of Oxford, the University of Palermo, the Universities of Gdansk and Wroclaw, the University of Texas in Austin, and the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. His teaching and research focus on basic issues of legal reasoning and moral and legal responsibility, with an emphasis on classical theories of justice and a correlative critique of efficiency theories. His published work appears in several international collections of leading scholarship on tort law and legal philosophy. He has served as chair of the Section on Torts and Compensation Systems of the Association of American Law Schools and is a member of the American Law Institute and the advisory boards of the Journal of Tort Law, The Center for Justice and Democracy, and the Torts, Product Liability and Insurance Law Journal of the Social Science Research Network.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
