Rights from Wrongs: The Origins of Human Rights in the Experience of Injustice - Hardcover

A completely original answer to one of the most difficult questions in legal philosophy: what is the source of human rights? This is a wholly new and compelling answer to one of the most persistent dilemmas in both law and moral philosophy: If rights are 'natural', where do these rights come from? Does natural law really exist outside the formal structure of humanly enacted law? On the other hand, if rights are nothing more than the product of human law, what argument is there for allowing the 'rights' of a few people to outweigh the preferences of the majority? In this book, renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz offers a fresh resolution to this age-old dilemma. Rights, he argues, do not come from God, nature, logic or law alone, they arise out of particular experiences with injustice. While justice is an elusive concept, hard to define and subject to conflicting interpretations, injustice is immediate, intuitive, widely agreed upon and very tangible. This is a timely book that will have an immediate impact on political dialogue, from the intersection of religion and law to quandaries surrounding the right to privacy, voting rights etc. It is also a passionate case for the recognition of human rights in a rigorously secular framework. Rights from Wrongs is the first book to propose a theory of rights that emerges not from some theory of perfect justice but from its opposite: from the bottom up, from trial and error, and from our collective experience of injustice.

Alan Dershowitz is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and one of America's foremost legal scholars. Known for defending the accused in many high-profile cases, he is also a columnist, lecturer, reviewer and prolific author.