Since Barnett is a law professor, it is not surprising that many of the sources cited in his footnotes are legal scholars rather than philosophers and that he uses terms found in legal journals in place of more common words. Sometimes this adds precision. Sometimes it doesn't. But Barnett defends them. He says lawyers play a crucial role in reducing partiality in the courts because they are repeat players in the legal system.
Rights are part of a planned architecture for society.
Barnett's objective in this book is to devise meta-rules for handling the problems of knowledge, interest, and power in such a way as to produce a society from scratch that will be as peaceful, cooperative, and prosperous as possible. The background rights that he comes up with are part of this plan. He finds the appeal that these rights have lies in our interest in solving these problems rather than in our conscience or personal integrity. He aims his argument at social architects rather than individual moral agents. In this regard, the prohibition on the use of force reflects an effort to handle the first-order problem of knowledge, which consists of permitting persons and associations to act on the basis of their diverse local and personal knowledge while taking into account the knowledge of others about which they are pervasively ignorant.