Book reviewed in this article: Justice, Gender, and the Family. By Susan Moller Okin. Making All the Difference. By Martha Minow.

This article discusses three main orientations in recent works of legal and political theory about the family-contract-based, community-based, and rights-based-and argues that none of these takes adequate account of two paradoxical features of family life and of the family's relationship to the state. A coherent political and legal theory of the family in the contemporary United States requires recognition of the relational rights and responsibilities intrinsic to family life.

ExcerptThe reasons why individual nations and even individual people subscribe to notions of human rights vary enormously. Rationales range from idealism to realpolitik and sound in competing registers of theology, social contract, nature, utility, and game theory.1 Pervasive in discussions of human rights is the dignity of each person as both a reality and a normative guide. Capacious and ambiguous, this notion of dignity may invite agreement precisely because different people project different meanings onto it. Its recognition, though, can inspire (...) attitudes of respect and civility even when we disagree. Dignity thus serves less as a foundation and more as a lodestar, an aspiration. Justice Thurgood Marshall once explained, “A child born to a [B]lack mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.”2. (shrink)

Il est constamment fait appel, dans le discours juridique et politique contemporains, à la notion de droits en France, aux Etats-Unis et en beaucoup d'autres lieux. Pourquoi? Comment faire sens de ces usages? Quel rôle exact cette notion joue-t-elle dans le fonctionnement réel du droit positif et comment aide-t-elle à l'analyser? Martha Minow et Robert M. Cover, dans les deux textes traduits dans cet ouvrage, invitent à reprendre la réflexion sur ces sujets.

Should people make demands for justice relating to events occurring in the past, even the distant past? What does and what should happen when they do? These questions frame the problems of historical justice that became especially palpable during the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries and contributed to innovations in the design and use of tribunals, truth commissions and reparations initiatives. These responses to calls for historical justice deal with objections and difficulties in their own ways. Objections to such innovations (...) include charges that they depart too radically from established legal forms, that they reopen old wounds, that they inevitably rely on stale and partial evidence, that their costs are excessive or divert resources from more pressing needs, and that they do little to prevent future atrocities or to heal social rifts. (shrink)