Law Commons^™

Lifting Our Veil Of Ignorance: Culture, Constitutionalism, And Women's Human Rights In Post-September 11 America, Catherine Powell

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

While we live in an Age of Rights, culture continues to be a major challenge to the human rights project. During the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the 1940s and during the Cold War era, the periodic disputes that erupted over civil and political rights in contrast to economic, social and cultural rights could be read either explicitly or implicitly as a cultural debate.

Gender has figured prominently in this perceived culture clash, for example, with the Bush administration's use of Afghan women as cultural icons in need of liberation--a claim that helped justify the …

Constitutive Commitments And Roosevelt's Second Bill Of Rights: A Dialogue, Randy E. Barnett, Cass R. Sunstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What made the Second Bill of Rights possible? Part of the answer lies in a simple idea, one pervasive in the American legal culture during Roosevelt's time: No one really opposes government intervention. Markets and wealth depend on government. Without government creating and protecting property rights, property itself cannot exist. Even the people who most loudly denounce government interference depend on it every day. Their own rights do not come from minimizing government but are a product of government. Political scientist Lester Ward vividly captured the point: "[T]hose who denounce state intervention are the ones who most frequently and successfully …

Torture's Truth, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article, I argue that the obstacles to having a serious conversation about torture are exacerbated by a truth that torture teaches us - a truth that we cannot afford fully to know and, so, frantically try to obscure. Law is about respect for commitments and limits, and the existence of torture challenges the possibility of such respect. If we are prepared to torture, then, it would seem, we are prepared to do anything, and the restraint that law purports to impose upon us is a fraud. Torture's truth, then, is that all of our promises to ourselves and …