Why am I starting this blog?

Hi, welcome to my new blog.  

I have started working on a new project which I've entitled, The Science of Right, a reference, in part, to the opening of Justinian's Institutes, which defines jurisprudence as justi atque injusti scientia - the knowledge (or 'science') of what is right and wrong.

Inst. 1.1 in my personal copy of the Volumen (Venice, 1569) p. 7.  Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

I have decided to start this blog partly as a way to record my progress, discoveries, and experiences as I work on this project.  Writing a book is a very solitary process, and my hope is that sharing my work in 'real-time' through a blog will enable me to share research directly with others who may be interested, as a quicker alternative to academic publishing.  

What is The Science of Right about?  In general, I envision this as a critical history of rights from roughly 1600-1900, with the Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, and the American legal theorist, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, as the bookends for the project.  There are several themes that I'm pursuing right now within this chronology.  One concerns the ambiguous function of rights, diagnosed famously in Hohfeld's analysis of rights in a famous paper in the Yale Law Journal on the structure of rights.  Hohfeld is credited with originating his analysis of the rights in terms of 'jural opposites' and jural correlates.'  What I hope to explore in The Science of Right is the pre-history of Hohfeld, and I believe that pre-history can be traced back to Grotius.  The Science of Right also presents a study of natural law and deontic logic.  

In some upcoming posts, I'll explain in greater detail some of my motivations for this project and share some of the themes I'm currently working on.  I am a novice to this craft of blogging, so I ask for your patience, as I learn how to do this.  Thanks for reading and for following this project.