Chapter 3 investigates the French nationality decrees promulgated in 1930 and 1936, which recognized the claims métis people had been making for decades: they were French and entitled to French legal status. These new legal pathways to French citizenship and demarcations of parameters of belonging were tied to concepts of how race and multiracial identity mapped onto French legal status. The decrees codified multiracial people as a specific category in French colonial thought and society, but within the context of how multiracial people themselves claimed multiracial selfhoods. The claims of métis people who petitioned for citizenship deepened the debates about race and racial identity and changed the very idea of Frenchness. The burden of proof on petitioners hinged on questions of paternity and French cultural competency. However, maternal kin and African communities played an essential role in the legal process. Métis obtainment of French citizenship was consequential for hierarchies of status within African societies. At the same time, it both contested and created hierarchies of social and legal status and privilege based on changing racial thought.

The chapter provides an analysis of the concept of rights. It clarifies the precise object of inquiry of the book. A particular focus is repesented by claim rights or subjective rights. Mayor elements of the analysis of subjective rights are recalled, including historical contributions from Natural Law thinkers, comments by legal positivists, the Hohfeldian framework and the rules and principles approach. The question as to whether it is conceptually impossible to regard social rights as proper rights is addressed. Central elements of a concept of rights are discussed, including the addressees of rights, the holders of rights and the problem of group rights. The relation of legal and moral rights is a further object of inquiry, as are the basic contents of human rights, the copossibility and limitations of rights, the nature of obligations, the peremptory nature of rights and questions of the interpretation of rights.

Chapter 8 adds to Chapter 7 by examining the special WTO cases of multiple respondents. It argues that Member States act as co-respondents when their restorative actions are necessary for compliance purposes. That depends on the nature and scope of the claim which, in turn, defines the remedy.

This chapter examines the role of government as representative claimant, representing the class. The government may be a directly affected claimant, or may fulfill the role of an ‘ideological claimant’. This role may fall to a government regulator, most commonly. Difficult legal issues may arise where that representative claimant does not share a cause of action with the class members which it purports to represent, or seeks a remedy which is different from that which the class members are seeking. Much depends upon the level of precision (or lack thereof) with which the class action statute is designed.