Michigan Law
A new book from Professor Nicolas Cornell takes a fresh look at the related concepts of rights and wrongs. While traditional thinking tends to bind these ideas together, Cornell argues they can and should be considered separately.
In “Wrongs and Rights Come Apart” (Harvard University Press, 2025), Cornell uses examples drawn from the law, literature, pop culture, and elsewhere to explore a variety of topics, including exploitation and the nature of forgiveness, through this lens.
Cornell holds a PhD in philosophy in addition to his JD, and he teaches and writes on contract law, moral philosophy, remedies, and private law theory. Recently he answered five questions about the issues addressed in the book:
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The traditional understanding, in both legal doctrine and moral philosophy, is that rights and wrongs are sort of flip sides of the same coin. That is, to have a right is to be the person who stands to be wronged. And to be wronged is to have had your rights violated.
What I’m trying to suggest is that these concepts can come apart, as the title suggests.
The book goes through lots of different ways in which this can happen, but I think the easiest entry point is by thinking about third-party cases.
For example, if you kill me, you will have wronged my mother, who cares about me quite a bit, but you will not have violated her rights.
There’s a wronging, but no rights of hers were violated.
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I think it should give one pause about a kind of inference that people are likely to draw—in legal reasoning, moral reasoning, or everyday-life reasoning—between these concepts. If you read my book and are convinced by some of the arguments, you might pause in making those kinds of inferences.
You might think, I have had my rights violated, so I have a grievance. Or you might think, if I didn’t have my rights violated, what grievance could I possibly have?
The book suggests that’s not an automatically correct inference—that maybe you do have a complaint even though your rights were not violated, and vice versa.
For example, think about situations of exploitation—say, sweatshop labor. Someone might have consented to the arrangement, knowingly and even rationally waiving their rights. But I don’t think we should conclude that they aren’t wronged.
Or think about what happens when you sign a liability waiver and surrender any future complaint. Are you thereby granting permission?
I think that you might only be granting a kind of preemptive forgiveness. Or think about nonhuman animals. They don’t have the same capacity to hold us accountable for our actions as other humans, but does that mean that they don’t hold rights in the same way?
So, in part, the book is about the ways in which we’re accountable to each other for things beyond rights violations, but without scrapping the whole notion of rights altogether. And, in part, it’s about the role that rights play even in the absence of accountability relations.
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I’ve been working on this project for a very long time. It grew out of my PhD dissertation, which grew out of a seminar that I took the very first year of graduate school. So I’ve been working on this basically for 20 years in some way or another.
A seminar I took in my first year of graduate school was about very contemporary work in moral philosophy with respect to relational obligations—moral obligations that are owed to another person. In that seminar, I started getting worried about some of these third-party situations.
Then I went to law school and was immediately confronted with Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., which is this famous torts case that the book starts off with. The same kind of conceptual move that concerned me in moral philosophy, I saw happening in the law.
That was striking to me, and this book grew out of that.
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The thing that’s been encouraging to me is that the reactions that I’ve gotten are from people who say, “I was completely convinced of the traditional picture before, and now I’m unsure.” I’ve gotten a fair number of people who have at least reported to me that reaction.
I’m not sure how many people I’ve convinced, but I’ve created a bit of uncertainty, and that strikes me as progress.
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Part of what I would like for readers to take away is a picture of more complexity than they might’ve seen before.
One kind of philosophical tradition is to think that sometimes our concepts can get in the way of our understanding. I see the book as being within that tradition: There’s a simple, elegant, conceptual picture that’s tempting, and it makes our thoughts smooth. But if you dig into it, you may realize that those concepts are getting in our way of understanding how our interpersonal lives work.
Another thing that I would love for readers to take away is the continuity between different domains of interpersonal life. The law is one domain in which we work out interpersonal justice, but so too are other, nonlegal features of our lives. I hope the book will prompt the reader to think about how the law is continuous with the rest of our lives.
But I’m also very content to have different readers take things from individual parts of the book, detached from the overarching thesis.
I had a fascinating conversation some years ago with a Christian radio host about my essay on preemptive forgiveness, which makes up Chapter 8 of the book. He didn’t care about rights theory, but he was very interested in the idea of preemptive forgiving, as an idea to put into practice in ordinary life.
So, one reader’s takeaway might just be the idea of preemptive forgiving. Some other reader might get a takeaway from the material on commercial warranties. A different reader might get a different takeaway from the
neighboring material on promises to love someone. Someone interested in nonhuman animals might focus only on the discussion of animal rights.
And so on. I’m fine with the fact that readers may find a lot of takeaways that aren’t precisely my broad takeaway.
Indeed, I guess that I sort of hope that happens.
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