S. Human Rights and Inequality

This seminar explores human rights law’s express recognition of the moral equality of all human beings, against the conditions of widespread and stark inequality in the world today. As we will examine, the law of human rights is global and rests on a vast array of international human rights treaties, customary international law, and borrowed, transplanted, or migrating constitutional or statutory fundamental rights. These two avenues – the international and the domestic – are together examined in this seminar, particularly in light of comparative trends in the constitutionalization and judicial enforcement of human rights. We will read and discuss material which queries how the law of human rights conceives of, and addresses, the problem of inequality, including the division between inequality wrought by status (a characteristic or identity such as race, gender, sexuality, differently abled status, or class), or by direct material, economic, resource-related questions. In particular, we will study how the so-called “economic and social rights” – which include the rights to an adequate standard of living, health care, education, housing, food, water and sanitation – grapple with such questions, and the iterative legal processes and institutional changes these rights enable. The seminar will draw on a range of recently published works, or works in progress.