Blog

Featuring "Artist for the People" Practitioner Fellows: Dorothy Burge and Michelle Daniel Jones with Mourning Our Losses (July 7 - September 10, 2023)

Mourning Our Losses invites incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists to submit visual works created during COVID-19 for an art exhibition inside their Traveling Memorial!

Read about the Human Rights Lab's pop-up art exhibition featuring Carving Out Rights from the Prison Industrial Complex and Humans of Life Row art works at the Chicago Transformation Collab Summit and Festival hosted by Zealous.

Free Minds, Free Voices was a night dedicated to celebrating the long, hard, work to end mass incarceration and build support for legislation for a parole system in Illinois.

Read reflections from students who turned responses and iterative feedback from the 21 incarcerated scholars, artists, and advocates into the chapbook: Humans of Life Row: “I walk into the future by visualizing it today”.

Congratulations to the 2021-22 Pozen Human Rights Lab BA Thesis Fellows!

Welcoming Michelle Daniel Jones and Dorothy Burge to the Practitioner Fellows family!

Want to learn about the intersecting human rights crises of racialized policing and mass incarceration in the United States? Check out THREE Human Rights Lab courses offered this Spring 2022.

The companion playlist to Truth & Beauty in the Hard Places Gallery. This Artfully curated playlist weaves together the works featured in "Truth and Beauty in the Hard Places, excavating the brokenness and resilience evident in our shared humanity.

In this fourth installment of IHRC’s blog series The Matter of Human Rights, third-year-law-student Aaron Tucek argues that procedural rights have intrinsic value and prove crucial for securing substantive human rights protections. Where access to legal services is a matter of either “luxury or charity,” a large portion of individuals will lack the means to access fair and public hearings. Tucek calls this the “missing middle” problem and demonstrates how it both reflects and encourages a failure to recognize “the profound inherent value of procedural human rights.”

In “Never Again – Fulfilling a Promise,” 3rd year law student Anna Duke discusses the crime of genocide as an example of how the history of international law has manifested as a struggle between aspiration and political will. Duke references past genocides and analyzes the Convention's language to argue public pressure can generate political will and overcome limitations of legal definitions.

On the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 3rd year law student Joseph Nunn critically examines the promises of the UDHR as they have been realized in practice.

This post is the first installment from UChicago Law's International Human Rights Law Clinic in a series titled — The Matter of Human Rights.

From Transitional to Transformative Justice, edited by Paul Gready and Simon Robins, is due out in November from Cambridge University Press.

There is a good interview with Bonny Ibhawoh about his recent book,  Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), in the New Books Network.

A recent book release of interest: Human Rights in Africa by Bonny Ibhawoh. 

New from Oxford University Press: The Idea of Human Rights Law by Steven Wheatley, due out in December.

Today, we’re interviewing Thomas West about his recent book on natural rights in the political theory of the American founding.

The American founding had plenty of discussions of natural rights. But there are plenty of controversies about natural rights and the American founding, ranging from the conceptual (what are natural rights?) to the practical significance (how important were natural rights to concrete political issues and constitutional design?).

By any reckoning, the Reformation had a huge historical impact. To help us think about the quincentenary of the Reformation, and its relevance to the study of human rights, I was delighted to have the chance to talk with Christine Helmer.

Historians discovered human rights in the late 1990s. Since then, lively conversations developed across almost every imaginable historical subfield, from medieval to modern. Much of the human rights historiography has been focused on the question of origins. Many historians have tried to locate the starting point of contemporary human rights ideas and practice, and they have suggested everything from as early as the twelfth century (and sometimes even earlier) to as late as the 1970s. Such enormous diversity of opinion can only be found in a field with widely divergent ideas about what in fact counts as “human rights.” The origins question is by no means settled and interesting debates on this issue continue. But in the last several years, many historians have been feeling fatigue set in on the origins debates. There is no reason that origins should be the organizing frame for the whole literature, and there is no shortage of alternative approaches available for historians of human rights to draw upon. This post is one way to make sense of (some of) what happened in the historiography over the last twenty years. I wrote it originally as a thought exercise for myself—there are of course other ways to think about the literature, and there’s a lot that I’ve left out of this (especially the many excellent and sophisticated histories written in the last few years). But it might also provide a useful introduction for non-specialists who would like to get a quick overview of how historians have written the history.

An interesting study of when the IMF pays attention to the human rights records of its client nations is out in the latest issue of Political Studies.

Samuel Moyn has his long-awaited book on human rights and economic inequality due out in March 2018.

H-Diplo has published a roundtable discussion on The World Reimagined, the recent book by Pozen Center director Mark Bradley.