The premise of the book, that rights exist in order to avoid or slow down the repetition of past wrongs committed by the human race, is a simple one... and one that I've found many of my associates seem able to accept ad hoc without much argument.

Alan M. Dershowitz will provide the arguments anyway, but most importantly he provides continually through the book a clarification on this view of the origins of rights. This clarification is that it is not a comprehensive doctrine that will yield a set of rights that we would find morally binding and logically valid. In his view, the establishment, and curtailment, of rights is a continual process. We ought to change our view of rights based on the experiences we continue to have. This includes experiences of wrongs we wish to avoid and experience as to whether the rights we establish help curtail those wrongs. As a result, once he starts talking about how this theory applies to real world issues, there are almost no resolutions presented to these issues (which include the questions of abortion, animal rights, and organ harvesting). Instead, he looks at the sides of the issue and how experience would inform each side.

As a result, this book provides more of a useful framework in which to debate what our rights ought to be instead of providing a comprehensive list of what those rights are. And, based on the observation that our world, society, culture and values change, such a comprehensive list is impossible. Such a framework is then useful when determining on the public stage what our rights ought to be.