Matthieu Queloz
Matthieu Queloz

Law 2

Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength

In Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata and Julieta Rabanos (eds.). Oxford: Hart. In Press. https://philpapers.org/archive/QUELAA.pdf

Reads Williams’s “What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?” as a radicalization of Austin’s insight that tort law is where the concepts of common sense are truly put on trial. Identifies seven features of tort litigation that subject notions like fault, intention, negligence, and voluntariness to extraordinary pressure. Explains, by contrasting tort law with criminal law, how differences in evidential standards, case profiles, and doctrines of strict liability display both the power and the weak points of our responsibility-tracking concepts.

conceptual engineering, legal philosophy, law, responsibility, Williams, conceptual change

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The Double Nature of DNA: Reevaluating the Common Heritage Idea

The Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (1): 47–66. 2016. doi:10.1111/jopp.12063

Addresses the political and legal conflict over gene patenting by reevaluating the influential idea that the human genome is the “common heritage of mankind.” Argues that the human genome is best understood not as a form of shared property, but as a repository of information to which we have a fiduciary relationship, which creates duties of preservation and access. This “preservationist heritage idea” largely dissolves the conflict with the patenting of genes themselves, though it also reveals how recent court decisions still make room for the patenting of commercially relevant molecules deriving from human DNA.

common heritage, DNA, bioethics, law, legal philosophy, political philosophy

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