Law Commons^™

A "Dignified Life" And The Resurgence Of Social Rights, Thomas M. Antkowiak

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

The international human rights movement and its institutions have faced searing criticism that they have abandoned social, economic, and cultural rights (“social rights”). While favorable treaties and constitutions have proliferated over the last decades, grave poverty, inequality, and disease still run rampant across the globe. Many have attributed the latest rise of demagogues and terrorist groups to this widespread social disenfranchisement.

The supranational human rights courts have historically avoided social rights enforcement due to limited subject-matter jurisdiction. Yet more recently the Inter-American Court of Human Rights introduced a conceptual breakthrough to assess social rights, which was affirmed by the U.N. …

Deliberation And Decision-Making Process In The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights: Do Individual Opinions Matter?, Ranieri L. Resende

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

The work is focused on the adjudicatory nature of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and investigates its model of deliberation, considering three basic schemes: per curiam, seriatim and hybrid. In order to identify an institutional pattern, the importance of individual opinions is analyzed through the quantitative performance of each category of judge (ad hoc and regular), as well as each type of adjudicative activity (judgments and advisory opinions). The quantitative data is also useful to better understand the explicit assimilation of separate opinions to the core reasoning of future cases. As a result, it has been possible to identify …