Eleanor Curran is honorary senior lecturer in the Philosophy Department and Law School at the University of Kent.
Eleanor Curran’s excellent book, Rethinking Rights, surveys the philosophy of legal rights, its history and current importance. The book’s purpose is “to examine the history of rights theory and the effects of that history and how it has been written, on how philosophers think about rights today….” [This book is] vividly thought-provoking, and its discussion is always stimulating. Its relative brevity should encourage readers to engage with its clearly-forged and economically expressed doctrines, and anyone wishing to gain familiarity with the territory of modern rights theories and their history can be well advised to read it. * Jotwell * Eleanor Curran is one of the premier theorists of the history of philosophy of individual rights, beginning with rights in the seminal thought of Thomas Hobbes. In her new book, which elucidates conceptions of natural rights from scholastic and early modern conceptions through empiricist and positivist attacks on those, Curran persuasively argues that we should reject the dominant Hohfeldian conception of rights as legal claims in favor of a novel way of justifying universal moral and political rights that separates them from most legal rights. Her argument that doing so provides a superior path for justifying universal moral and political rights is one that no serious theorist of rights can afford to ignore. -- Sharon Anne Lloyd, University of Southern California