Human Rights

This course provides a place to learn about, discuss, interrogate, build upon, and critique the law of human rights. It surveys the substantive legal doctrines that protect against state-activated oppression, in the United Nations human rights regime and in other global, regional and national institutions. These developments are presented against a backdrop of postwar, decolonization, postcommunist and constitutionalization processes. In particular, the readings examine the capacity of human rights law to address such pressing normative ideals as global justice, gender equality, racial equality, sexual and reproductive rights, economic security, corporate and regulatory responsibility, and collective responses to climate change. The course approaches these questions from the perspective of international human rights law and comparative human rights law, and, in part, law and political economy, law and development, and law and social change. A recurrent theme will be where, when and how the United States contributes to this evolving field of law. The open source textbook is available at https://humanrightstextbook.org/digital-book