Understanding the nature and role of rights is a central issue in the philosophy of practical reason. Asking how legal rights relate to their moral counterparts, this book criticises existing analytic models and presents a new theory based on the idea of public reason.

The supranational law of the European Union represents a uniquely powerful, far-reaching, and controversial instance of the growth of international legal governance, one that has forever altered the political and legal landscape of its Member States. The EU has attracted significant attention from political scientists, economists, and lawyers who have analysed its polity and constructed theoretical models of the integration process. Yet it has been almost entirely neglected by analytic philosophers, and the philosophical tools that have been developed to analyse and evaluate the Union are...