Abstract

TUZET, Giovanni. A Pragmatist Conception of Rights. Isonomía [online]. 2013, n.39, pp.11-36. ISSN 1405-0218.

This paper asks what the point is of conferring or recognizing individual rights and claims it is their consequences that are the most important. The claim has the virtue of bringing down to earth the aerial vocabulary of rights and of inviting to determine their content in the most precise and concrete possible way. It is a realist and pragmatist conception of legal rights: realist, because it intends to grasp the real import of having rights; pragmatist, because, in order to do that, it focuses on the consequences of having rights. The paper also shows how this pragmatist thesis can provide an adequate account of fundamental rights.

Keywords : Consequences of rights; fundamental rights; O. W. Holmes; legal realism; legal rights; C. S. Peirce; pragmatism.