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Human rights have become the grounding of human solidarity. They are, today, the substance of the brotherhood of man. They take the place once occupied by "our common clay," our common ancestry, and our common relationship with the Deity. This being the case, it is important to understand what, in turn, grounds human rights. There is nothing approaching a consensus: indeed, the impressive edifice on which much of the political order of the world now rests has been constructed based on the conscious decision by its principal authors to prescind from asking this basic question. Unsurprisingly under these circumstances, more and more rights are being proposed, and many divergent theories are propounded as to their bases. This Essay considers four proposed bases and rejects them. It proposes an account according to which the ethical basis for human rights is the protection of fundamental human attributes.

There is a considerable incongruity between the ends and aims of the business association, on the one hand, and the ends and aims of the family -- and thus of most family businesses -- on the other. This Essay proposes a principle for the guidance of the law in such matters. This is the principle of subsidiarity, which instructs government and the law to recognize the smaller organizations of society and to foster their functioning along lines appropriate to their purposes and along the lines intended by their principals. This Essay develops an especially rich account of the principle of subsidiarity, according to which that principle calls for a presumption, in matters concerning family businesses, that the principals intend the normativity of the family to dominate. Vigorous application of this enriched principle, it is here proposed, will lead to important doctrinal developments, and also to courts' reorienting their general attitude towards the development of the theory and policy of business associations.

This article proposes veracity and respect as basic guides for law. It thus supplements dominant lines of thought which emphasize instrumentalist criteria such as promoting efficiency, maximizing utility, and deterring and remedying harm. This article proposes that it is a great good for a judge, a legislator, and all who speak as the law to exercise the virtue of veracity and to speak with respect, and that it is especially bad in the case of such legal officers to depart from those practices. It points out some implications for family law.

This Article, which explores the nature of fiduciary relationships, demonstrates that these relationships arise and function in ways that are alien to contractualist thought. While the relationships may, like marriage relationships, be part of the same genus, they are indeed members of a different species. Fiduciary relationships differ both in doctrinal structure and ethical basis. However, some contractualist writing denies one or the other of these two propostitions. This Article, therefore, aims to establish that both are in fact true. The author presents that fiduciary relationships have value and serve purposes that are largely unknown to contractualists. Furthermore, these relationships facilitate the doing of justice, promote virtue, and enhance freedom in a distinctive way.