Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Human Rights Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Human Rights Law

Toward A Science Of Torture?, Maxwell Gregg Bloche May 2017

Toward A Science Of Torture?, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Does torture “work?” Proponents, including President Trump and the architects of CIA “Enhanced Interrogation” say it does, by breaking terrorists' resistance to revealing information that saves lives. Torture's foes typically dismiss this claim as false to the point of fraud--fortuitous coincidence with torture's unlawfulness. Neither view, I argue herein, rests firmly on evidence. Rival anecdotes, not data, have, so far, driven this debate. And a scientific answer is beyond our reach, since: (1) rigorous comparison between interrogation methods that do and don't involve torture isn't possible, and (2) studies of this sort would be transparently unethical. This hasn't stopped the …


Affording Fundamental Rights, Julie E. Cohen Mar 2017

Affording Fundamental Rights, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mireille Hildebrandt’s Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law (2015) raises questions for law that are best characterized as meta-institutional. This review essay considers the implications of Hildebrandt’s work for the conceptualization of fundamental rights. One consequence of the shift to a world in which smart digital technologies continually, immanently mediate and preempt our beliefs and choices is that legal discourses about fundamental rights are revealed to be incomplete along a dimension that we have simply failed to recognize. To remain effective in the digital age, rights discourse requires extension into the register of affordances.