Can we say that a company like Gap or Nike is committing human rights violations if we find the factories in which its clothes are made are horribly abusive toward their workers?

That’s just one example of the issues Professor Jean Thomas deals with in her new book Public Rights, Private Relations published by Oxford University Press.

“The book is about whether and how we can justify holding non-governmental actors responsible for acts that would, if committed by governments, clearly violate constitutional or human rights,” says Thomas, an LLM and PhD graduate of the New York University School of Law who joined Queen’s in 2014.

Thomas decided to write the book upon recognizing that the rights people take to be the most important – namely, rights to freedom from oppression and abuse, free expression, free thought and conscience, and to various forms of equality – are actually only rights that people hold against their governments. “When I figured that out,” she says, “I realized that those rights are in some sense not really ‘ours.’ If they were, I thought, why would it matter whether the freedoms I had in mind were violated by the government or by someone else?”

It’s the last question that she attempts to answer in her book, arguing that it shouldn't matter whether people’s rights are violated by the state or by powerful private actors to whom they find themselves in a position of vulnerability similar to the one in which individuals stand in relation to their government.

Thomas started writing the book, a developed version of her doctoral thesis, during her last year of studies. She refined it while doing post-doctoral work at Stanford University’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. The end product is touted as a “clear and novel assessment of current debates in rights theory that brings together issues in several areas of rights theory and moral theory in the context of a concrete problem.”

Read more about the book at the Oxford University Press website.