Program in Ethics and Public Affairs

ABSTRACT:  Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) holds a place of honor in the modern history of rights.  In this talk, I’ll explore why he remains so prominent in this history, and that is what I call ‘the Grotian rights revolution.’  This ‘rights revolution’ consisted of three parts – (1) the sudden shift from strict ‘remedies’ to elastic ‘rights’ in early-modern legal and moral science; (2) the proto-Hohfeldian distinction between permissive liberty-right [jus], strict claim-right [jus stricte dictum], and legal powers [potestas]; (3) the recognition that claims of merit or desert [waerdigheid] are ‘imperfect’ rights that can burden others and even require them to perform virtuous acts of beneficence, fidelity, or charity, as correlative ‘imperfect’ duties. While Grotius originally developed his theory of rights to craft a so-called ‘legal right to wage war’ [jus ad bellum] as a means to get what is one’s due, Grotius imagined rights, in general, as artifacts of the transactional and adversarial culture of litigation in a Roman court.  That litigious culture is, in my view, encoded into the genetics of modern liberal politics.
 

Daniel Lee is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is a specialist in political theory and the history of political thought and has been interested in studying how the techniques of legal reasoning in the legal science of Roman and canon law have shaped the core idioms of modern political theory – sovereignty, statehood, citizenship, and rights. Professor Lee is the author of Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford, 2016) and The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations (Oxford, 2021). He is currently completing a new title, Divisions of Law (also for Oxford University Press), and now beginning a new project called The Science of Right, an intellectual history of law and deontic logic from Grotius to Hohfeld.  Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Professor Lee taught political theory at the University of Toronto and Columbia University.  He is a graduate of Princeton and a former graduate prize fellow of the University Center for Human Values.  
 

Registration is recommended. To register, click here.