Legal Theory and Dialectically Contingent Justifications for the Principle of Generic Consistency

. It is argued that accepting that there are human rights, or that there are categorically binding requirements of any kind on action, logically requires accepting the PGC (Principle of Generic Consistency ) as the supreme criterion of practical reasonableness. Consequently, all legal systems that recognise human rights (hence, the English legal system), all who view law as a matter of obligation, and all who consider that there are categorically binding requirements on action, must take the PGC to be a necessary criterion of legal validity. Conventions on human rights must, as conventions on human rights , be interpreted to conform with the PGC .