TFL Vsebine / Revija Revus

This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the concepts of law and rights in John Rawls’s political conception of justice. After consulting Rawls’s texts for his account of law and rights, as well as the secondary literature on these texts, the meta-juridical foundation of the Rawlsian concepts of law and rights is articulated. I suggest that Rawls’s argument for the priority of right over ideas of the good is central to an adequate understanding of Rawlsian juridical constructivism. I then explore Rawls’s conception of what may be referred to as “political natural rights”, especially regarding certain inadequacies in Ronald Dworkin’s and Rex Martin’s assessment of the Rawlsian structural locus and origin of these rights. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the place of Rawls’s concepts of law and rights on the conceptual map of contemporary juridical-philosophical debates.