Jerome A. Cohen
American legal scholar specializing in Chinese and East Asian law; longtime professor (including at NYU School of Law), founder of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, and an influential adviser on Chinese legal reform and human rights.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
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2. Self Ownership, Freedom, And Equality
The book offers a rigorous philosophical critique of the idea that absolute self-ownership can serve as the sole foundation for a just social order, arguing that unfettered claims to one’s body and the fruits of one’s labor fail to justify wide economic inequalities and ignore the morally arbitrary distribution of natural talents and starting positions. It distinguishes the moral force of personal autonomy from claims to unlimited control over external resources, challenges libertarian entitlement theories and market outcomes that produce deep inequality, and defends a robust egalitarian alternative that preserves individual liberty while imposing constraints on how social and economic goods are distributed. Through careful argument and thought experiments, it explores the relationship between freedom and equality and develops a case that meaningful freedom requires institutions that mitigate arbitrary advantages and promote fair opportunity.