This winter, the Pozen Center Faculty Director Mark Philip Bradley travelled to the University of Chicago Center in Delhi, where he was invited to give a Harper Lecture.
Our consensus on what constitutes a human right dates back only to the 1940s, when the global human rights imagination first began to take shape. In this lecture, Bradley chronicles the complex histories that have formed our contemporary understanding of human rights and illustrates how that understanding has become a force behind international and local politics. In particular, he addresses the Indian Supreme Court’s decision last December to uphold Section 377, the colonial-era law that criminalizes sexual activities “against the order of nature,” most notably, gay sex.