Blog posted under Law

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.

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

Readers will be interested in the University of Toronto Law Journal's new symposium on Patrick Macklem's book, The Sovereignty of Human Rights.

New from Oxford University Press and likely to be of interest to readers of this blog, The Law of Nations and the United States Constitution by Anthony J. Bellia Jr. and Bradford R. Clark.

Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (April 2017), The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi.

I always enjoy hearing how scholars find their subjects, whether they are graduate students working on their dissertation or are well-established professors working on a second or third book. I’m in the former category - a grad student - and I don’t have to look too far into the past for the story of how I started writing in the field of human rights.

Eric Posner (University of Chicago Law School) has posted a timely and thought-provoking paper on SSRN, “Liberal Internationalism and the Populist Backlash.” Well worth reading for anyone interested in human rights issues.

Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power by Anna Su was released earlier this year.

In the latest issue of the Journal of American History, H. Timothy Lovelace (Indiana University—Bloomington) has an article, "William Worthy's Passport: Travel Restrictions and the Cold War Struggle for Civil and Human Rights." From the article: