Letters

Ja, Epstein

doi:10.1097/00007632-199608010-00027

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…He focuses on distributive justice and rules of 'natural' acquisition to assign ownership of external objects to individual persons, which rules fix a set of original rights that can then be transformed and recombined through voluntary transactions, following Nozick's conception of historical justice of entitlement and free disposition. 18 He shifts then to the rule of self-ownership of individual labour, which while enabling voluntary transactions based on consent, ties best the arguments for autonomy to the modem economics definitions of social welfare and Pareto-efficiency. He considers it as the cornerstone for freedom of contract in labour markets.…”

Section: B Epstein's Libertarianismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discrimination and Freedom of Contract

Besson

1999

International Journal of Discrimination and the Law

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aim of this article is to clarify the apparent antithesis between the fundamental private autonomy of the contractual parties and the right of a party not to be discriminated against and found anti-discrimination law's legitimacy in philosophy and economics. The purpose of reviving this controversy derives from a recent attack from some of the scholars of the 'law and economics' movement on antidiscrimination law, and from Richard Epstein's Forbidden Grounds in particular. Within the efficiency rationale discourse it is in reality the freedom of contract principle which is reassessed as being fundamentally violated by anti-discrimination law.The study tackles the problem by, first, analyzing potential philosophical foundations, denying any plausibility to Epstein's derived libertarianism and supporting Gardner's autonomy-based perfectionism, and, secondly, presenting efficiency-based foundations of anti-discrimination law, leading to the conclusion that anti-discrimination law may lead to efficient results by speeding-up the market process. The final aim of the study is to reconcile anti-discrimination policy and freedom of contract within both a market-and a social-sensitive contract theory, such as the 'Social Market' Theory that conceives of freedom of contract as autonomybased and thus conditioned upon the respect of the prohibition of discrimination.

show abstract

Section: B Epstein's Libertarianismmentioning

confidence: 99%