Rights and Responsibilities by Leon Trakman, Sean Gatien (review)

290 letters in canada 1999 theory pertaining to non-violence: works by Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Ghandi, Catherine Marshall, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Gene Sharp, Ursula Franklin, and various feminist writers. This chapter is innovative in approach, and would stimulate much discussion in an upper-level seminar on the subject. Chapter 5, by Nigel Young, focuses on peace movements. More specifically , it focuses on how we study peace movements. It briefly considers the origins of peace movements, and then moves on to discuss how such movements should be classified. Young points out that peace movements are fluid, changing in composition and intent over time. Such changes make classification difficult. Larry Fisk has written the subsequent chapter on peace education. This chapter grapples with how to best teach `peace studies.' Fisk notes that peace studies is not frequently taught in a formal manner B often in a university classroom, in which the professor's knowledge and experiences are more highly valued than are the knowledge and experiences of the students. Such a setting disregards and devalues indigenous, non-formal, and everyday knowledge. Moreover, it treats peace education as a datagathering enterprise, in which students passively accumulate facts and ideas. Fisk seeks peace through education instead. In such an approach both students and teachers would take part in the learning process. This approach would employ a problem-posing approach, in which participants question and consider real-life problems. The volume concludes with an epilogue in which the authors each express their thoughts after having read the other chapters in the book. It is conversational in tone and raises a host of issues for further consideration. For example, Morrison notes the conflict that may arise between those who theorize about conflict management and those who practise it, while Young discusses the difficulties that can be involved in seeking a positive peace without physical violence. Patterns of Conflict, Paths to Peace is a good, solid text for an introductory course in peace and conflict studies. It is easy to read, discusses and defines key concepts and debates, and encourages the reader to engage in critical thinking. The volume is also balanced: it includes chapters by researchers with various backgrounds, as well as practitioners, and covers a wide variety of topics. (BETH FISCHER) Leon Trakman and Sean Gatien. Rights and Responsibilities University of Toronto Press. xii, 286. $60.00, $24.00 This book aims to reconceive rights in a way that is friendly to communities . It opens by rehearsing some familiar criticisms of liberal accounts of justice from the past two decades. The criticisms rest on the idea that humanities 291 liberals have a flawed, because shallow and `unencumbered,' understanding of the human person. Unfortunately, there is no discussion of such familiar liberal doctrines as the separation of powers between the legislature and judiciary, or of the distinction between private law governing relations between private parties, and public law governing the state's treatment of its citizens. This is disappointing in a book that purports to be about law. Whatever one makes of the philosophical arguments for and against liberalism (a topic to which this book makes no novel contribution), any book that seeks to reconfigure the idea of individual rights needs to pay careful attention to the institutions that would be charged with interpreting and enforcing those rights. Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's prominent analysis of legal rights provides the foil for the authors' alternative account. Hohfeld's key idea was that rights are correlative with duties on the part of others: to assert a right to freedom of expression is to claim that others have a duty to refrain from preventing my expression; to assert a property right in some object is to claim that others must not trespass upon, or interfere with my use or enjoyment of that thing. Trakman and Gatien suggest that Hohfeld's analysis leaves no room for responsibilities, which, they insist, are different from duties because they connect people to each other. Moreover, responsibilities are said to be `internal' to rights, and to protect interests in a different way than either rights or state action do. These differences sound important, but seem not to amount to...