Matthew H. Kramer's "Rights and Right-Holding"

Matthew H. Kramer is Professor of Legal & Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the Director of the Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy, and he has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2014. His work covers numerous areas of political, moral, and legal philosophy.

Kramer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his book, Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my 2024 book Rights and Right-Holding is the opening page of the book’s third chapter. Given that the page tersely summarizes some of the main lines of thought from the preceding chapter while also outlining the chief aims of Chapter 3, a sciolist who wants to appear to be acquainted with the content of the book without actually reading it could do worse than to turn to page 99. Still, the book was not written for sciolists, and anyone who peruses page 99 in isolation might feel somewhat at sea. For example, such a person will encounter the phrase “disjunctive universal quantification.” If he or she is already familiar with the terminology of formal logic, then the phrase just mentioned will be understandable. Otherwise, however, that phrase may seem formidably opaque to anyone who has not taken the time to read Chapter 2 before moving on to the opening page of Chapter 3.

In five chapters that span 400 pages, Rights and Right-Holding presents a systematic philosophical exposition of the nature of rights and the nature of right-holding. Page 99 of the book occurs approximately halfway through the exposition of rights. For some readers, the issues addressed in the book that will be of greatest interest are those which pertain to the holding of claim-rights (and of other entitlements such as liberties, powers, and immunities). Such readers might, for example, be particularly interested in questions about the holding of claim-rights by non-human animals or by future generations of people or by dead people. Those issues, and numerous other matters pertaining to the holding of claim-rights or other entitlements, are nowhere in evidence on page 99. Thus, anyone who starts and finishes with page 99 will get a highly distortive and impoverished sense of why I have written Rights and Right-Holding.

Learn more about Rights and Right-Holding at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue