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Law Review: Human Rights and the Empire of (International) Law

By Alliance Alert

Catherine Turner, Human Rights and the Empire of (International) Law (June, 14 2010). Journal of Law and Inequality, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1624847 "This paper will argue that a fundamental conceptual shift occurred in international law during the 1980s. This shift was crucial to the development of human rights law but is largely overlooked in literature that assesses the move from standard setting to enforcement post 1989. Whereas traditionally international law had relied on a rigid 'Sources' doctrine rooted in state consent for its normativity, this was increasingly challenged during the 1980s by those who advocated a more abstract justification of the 'good' or the 'just' as a basis for legal decision making. The increasing purchase of these arguments amongst academics, judges and NGO?s quietly laid the foundations for a much more holistic system of interpretation of international law particularly, but not exclusively, in the field of human rights. This shift was crucial to the success of human rights as it extended the boundaries of legal normativity to encompass the protection of human rights per se as an international objective, and allowed advantage to be taken of the changed political context post 1989."

Full post as published by Constitutionally Correct on June 14, 2010 (boomark / email).