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The purpose of this workshop is to begin conceptualising the history of ‘duties’ and their relationship to ‘rights’. Historians have long treated duties either parenthetically or as afterthoughts in their histories of rights. Although legal scholars are well-aware of the problems of ‘duties’ and ‘duty-bearing’ in law, historians have tended to neglect them. But what would a history of ‘rights’ look like by foregrounding the problem of ‘duties’? How might this history be approached? And is a ‘long’ or ‘deep’ history of duties (the two are not the same) possible and useful?

This workshop brings together scholars working on various periods, various parts of the world and various kinds of ‘rights’ to explore the historical significance of duties. It invites ‘blue-sky’ thinking about the topic and will explore the possibility of collaborative research. Questions to be considered include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Has the articulation of duties followed behind the articulation of rights in history; have they emerged concurrently with rights; or have they preceded them? Is there a history to be told that begins with duties before rights?
• What historical conditions favour the emphasising of ‘rights’ over ‘duties’ or the inverse: duties over rights?
• What relationship have duties had with rights?

• Are duties merely the deducible correlatives of rights, or something different?
• To what degree have the discursive underpinnings of duties extended beyond those of rights? Should the discourses of ‘rights’ and ‘duties’ be understood as intersecting or overlapping but not perfectly aligned? If so, what forces affect the degree of their overlap? (Politics, class interests, economic priorities, religion, social structure and institutions.)

• How have ‘rights’ and ‘duties’ related to each other in periods of political crisis or radical change?
• Have discourses of ‘duties’ served to strengthen or weaken the cause of rights? If both, under what conditions have the ‘strengthening’ or the ‘undermining’ occurred?
• Have discourses of ‘duties’ operated differently in the spheres of natural rights philosophy and law?
• Can a history of ‘duties’ expand our understanding of ‘rights’ history, throwing light on political, cultural or intellectual aspects of the relationship between the two?

We will conclude by gathering together the ideas presented over the course of the workshop, planning a course of action and identifying potential participants and funding sources.