Philosopher Kings? The Adjudication of Conflicting Human Rights and Social Values

Philosopher Kings? The Adjudication of Conflicting Human Rights and Social Values , by George C. Christie, examines the attempts by courts to sort out conflicts involving freedom of expression, including religious expression, on the one hand, and rights to privacy and other important social values on the other. It approaches the subject from a comparative perspective, using principally cases decided by European and United States courts. A significant part of this book analyzes conflicts between freedom of expression and the right to privacy. In a world in which, freedom of expression and privacy are said to be of equal value, the book explores whether it is possible to develop, through case-by-case adjudication, a legal regime which can give clear direction as to what expression is or is not permitted. Otherwise, if such a regime proves impossible, in the guise of recognizing the equal value of expression and privacy, privacy may become de facto the preferred value.

George C. Christie is James B. Duke Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law. He has degrees from Columbia and Harvard, and a diploma in International Law from Cambridge. In addition to a long career in academia, he has been at various times a lawyer in private practice as well as assistant general counsel for the United States Agency for International Development.

His chief academic interests are in the areas of torts and jurisprudence, in both of which he has published widely. His monograph: The Notion of an Ideal Audience in Legal Argument was published in 2000 and then translated and published in French in 2005. An earlier monograph: Law, Norms and Authority was published in 1982. His current interest in problems encountered in the adjudication of human rights is part of his wider interest in comparative legal reasoning. Professor Christie has been a visiting professor at a number of universities in the United States, including Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, as well as at universities in Greece, New Zealand, China, Japan, South Africa, and Germany. He is a past fellow of the National Humanities Center in the United States and has also been a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.