Disputes over the scope of specific rights, e.g., over the right to free speech, the right to property, or the right to equality, often originate in differing assumptions concerning the reasons that justify the protection of these rights. Thus, those who believe that reasons of autonomy justify the right to free speech will identify the scope of this right differently from those who justify this protection through, say, appeal to the marketplace of ideas. Despite the diverse subject matter of these disputes, there is a uniform structure characterizing them. Some supporters of rights, call them “traditionalists,” locate the reasons that justify the protection of rights within individualistic concerns. Others, call them “revisionists,” deny this traditional claim and argue that rights can be partially or exclusively grounded in societal interests.

Traditionalism’ and ‘revisionism’ are terms stipulated to clarify the conceptual difference between two different understandings of rights. These understandings are often implicit in the way the term ‘rights’ is used in political or legal debates concerning the scope of particular rights. At other times, these implicit understandings of the term ‘rights’ are articulated more or less explicitly by moral or political philosophers investigating the nature of rights. Thus, when the terms ‘revisionist’ or ‘traditionalist’ are used in this article, they are used in two different ways. Sometimes, they denote implicit fundamental presuppositions about the nature of rights—presuppositions which underlie many of the contemporary debates over the scope of particular rights. At other times, they denote philosophical theories exploring systematically the nature of rights and the reasons underlying them.

Environmental protection laws are a recent legal development. As soon as these statutes first began to appear, it was evident that the fundamental principles of environmental protection would conflict, at some point, with fundamental principles from other, older, substantive bodies of law. In the American legal system, nowhere has the conflict been more serious than between environmental protection law and the law of bankruptcy. While this problem has attracted significant attention in the law reviews, it has been little noticed outside legal circles. This conflict sheds important light on the nature of normative conflicts generally, and points to the need for a well-developed theory of conflict resolution which courts can use when deciding cases. The root of the problem lies in a conflict between the underlying policy goals of these substantive bodies of law such that satisfying one policy objective necessarily undercuts the other. As such, the conflict between bankruptcy and environmental protection should be classified as a normative collision. This discussion examines this normative collision as it exists in American law in some detail. Such an examination provides interesting insights into the nature and pervasiveness of normative conflicts in our legal system. It also serves to illuminate both the theoretical and practical need for a coherent, well developed mechanism for resolving normative conflicts when conflicts arise.

In 1993, two young boys were convicted for the murder of a two-year-old toddler, James Bulger. Both boys were ten years old when the murder was committed. Such a violent act raises the timeless question: At what age should a child be held fully responsible by a nation’s criminal justice system for criminal conduct? Serious crimes are being committed by young persons and the public seems to have the impression that such acts are being committed at an increasingly young age.

Generally, the age of criminal responsibility (or legal responsibility) refers to the age at which a person becomes subject to the full penalties provided by the criminal law and this age varies greatly from country to country. In the Bulger case, at the age of ten, both boys had reached the age of criminal responsibility in England. Yet in other countries, this would not have been the case. In Canada, for example, the young persons would not have been subject to the criminal law since the minimum age of legal responsibility is twelve years. Historically, young persons have been given special treatment under the criminal law. Under the doli incapax (incapable of committing a crime) standard, a child’s capacity to commit a crime was questioned when attempting to affix criminal responsibility. Some countries still adhere to this common law doli incapax rule. In the first section of this paper, I will outline both the historical and present diversity between countries in relation to the age of criminal responsibility, as well as the associated advantages and disadvantages of these various systems.

Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle first elucidated his theory of morality in the Nicomachean Ethics by systematically examining and analyzing the virtues which he felt were necessary for the attainment of the Good in the here and now. One of the most controversial and perhaps least understood portions of this magnum opus are those that pertain to the now famous building blocks of legal philosophy: corrective and distributive justice. These terms remain as relevant today as when they were first “discovered” in large part due to modern legal theory’s increasing tendency to rely on Aristotle’s corrective and distributive ideas as the organizing and distinguishing principles of the private and public law, respectively. If corrective justice is to define the limits and form of the private law, however, a blind reliance on Aristotle’s interpretation is mistaken. An examination of Aristotle’s corrective justice shows that his legal philosophy is incomplete and often paradoxical—asserting premises that are irreconcilable on a plain reading of Aristotelian texts. In order to demonstrate these inconsistencies, this paper will first distinguish between corrective and distributive justice. It will then examine three of the most difficult and least understood aspects of corrective justice: namely, Aristotle’s conception of equality, reciprocity, and correlativity in gain and loss.

In recent years, there has been tremendous interest in the contributions of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant to on-going debates about the appropriate nature of international justice and law. The end of the Cold War, for example, seemed to bring with it promises of greater international cooperation of the kind envisaged by Kant. Furthermore, those interested in the more explicitly moral aspects and potentialities of international law, such as those regarding human rights protection, have looked to Kant for comfort and inspiration in the face of strong pressures from doctrines dismissive of such aspects, such as law-and-economics and the statist strictures of realpolitik.

There has, however, been widespread scholarly disagreement over Kant’s precise heritage in this regard: some, for instance, have found in Kant’s international writings a harbinger of world government while others have criticized Kant for faihng to specify any concrete powers for his fabled cosmopolitan federation; some have accused Kant of sacrificing his exalted moral principles on the dubious altar of state-centred expediency while others dismiss Kant as one of the most naively optimistic, and hopelessly moralistic, international thinkers ever; and, finally, some have accused Kant of glorifying the resort to warfare while others insist that Kant actually advocated “an extreme pacifism.” There is, in short, a ferocious and complex debate regarding which set of ideas can properly be called the “Kantian” view of these foremost issues of international law and what, if any, value can be attached to it.

John Rawls stands in a small pantheon of writers whose ideas have shaped the vocabularies of their age. Like a classical deity, his work has been invoked by disciple and dissenter alike as the essential totem of the modern liberal state. But his Promethean creation has grown independent from its original design, attaining significance not only for its initial merits but also for the competition it offers to the plan of its creator. So from the stage of Rawlsian liberal neutrality stalks the idea of legal perfectionism.

Legal perfectionism is the doctrine according to which officials may adopt and enforce laws according to the officials’ understanding of a good life, with the intended practical effect that people governed by such laws will lead better lives. In other words, legal perfectionism broadly enshrines the notion, sometime unpopular among Western theorists, that the government has, or should have, the power to reflect ideas of good and evil—the content of the good life or of good projects or of excellence—in framing the laws. While related both to older ideas of human perfection and perfectibility and to perennial concepts of virtue and morality, legal perfectionism has developed a distinct, modern meaning.

Kant described the ability to move from theory to practice, to subsume particular facts under general principles, as “judgment”:

But Kant had little to say by way of guidance for the exercise of judgment, because, in his view, judgment itself could not be completely theorized: