In-Person | Legal Duties, Rights, and Liberties

Speaker: Prof. Luís Duarte d’Almeida (NOVA School of Law, Lisbon)
Chair: Prof. Kevin Toh (UCL Laws)

About the talk

Prof Duarte d'Almeida offers a non-relational framework of legal duties, rights and liberties. He first draw a distinction between two classes of statements of legal positions. One is that of statements of (what I propose to call) “discrete” legal positions: statements of the forms “A has a liberty to φ”, “A has a duty to φ”, “B has a right that A φ”. The second is that of statements of (what he proposes to call) “comprehensive” legal positions: statements of the forms “A has the liberty to φ”, “A has the duty to φ”, “B has the right that A φ.” The distinction, he argues, is theoretically fruitful, and should form the basis of a framework for the analysis of fundamental legal positions. He then develops such a framework, putting together a comprehensive picture of how statements of both kinds interrelate logically—both internally to each class, and between the two classes.

About the speaker

Luís Duarte d’Almeida joined the NOVA School of Law in Lisbon in January 2022. Until then he was Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh, where he currently holds an appointment as Honorary Professorial Fellow. He teaches and writes on jurisprudence and legal argumentation.

This is an in-person only event

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