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Elizabeth Kingdom, "Transforming Rights: Feminist Political Heuristics", Res Publica Vol.II no.1 (1996), 63-75: The phrase "transforming rights" refers to: (a) the processes whereby the specification of rights in formal declarations such as the European Social Charter can initiate a legal "career" with results which go against women's interests, leading to disillusion with rights as incorporated into constitutional politics; (b) the grounds, exemplified by radical feminism, debates around the class politics of new social movements, and communitarian theory, for hostility to the claim that appealing to rights can contribute to the transformation of society; (c) strategies for the transformation of rights. Despite reservations about the efficacy of rights discourse for feminist and progressive legal politics, the reconceptualisation of "women's rights" as "feminist political heuristics" is proposed. Rights are seen as heuristics, in the sense that they provide guidelines or directives for developing research programmes. In this way, the appeal to rights is no longer the statement of a moral imperative but a mechanism for initiating the processes leading to the formulation of feminist policy objectives or draft legislation. This proposal is exemplified by an analysis of the conflict between conceptualising women's rights to social benefits on an employment model and conceptualising them on a welfare model.
Author's address: Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street North, Liverpool L69 7Z, e-mail: Kingdom@liverpool.ac.uk

Elizabeth Kingdom, "Right without might: liberal minority politics", Res Publica Vol.III no.l (1997), 115-119: Can liberals justify minority rights and retain their traditional commitment to human rights and individual rights? Will Kymlicka argues that a liberal commitment to freedom of choice and to personal autonomy demands a concern with cultural membership and requires the promotion of minority rights. His criticism of traditional doctrines of human rights is not that they provide the wrong answers relating to questions concerning cultural minorities but that they provide no answers at all. But communitarians, feminists and Marxists have made precisely that cridcism of all rights claims, and their critique can just as easily - and in logic has to be - applied to Kymlicka's own doctrine of minority rights. e-mail: Kingdom@liverpool.ac.uk

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