Human Rights Law Commons^™

Democracy Promotion In The Obama Administration: An Opportunity To Match Action To Rhetoric, Patrick J. Glen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article addresses whether and to what extent the Obama administration should continue the Bush administration policies relating to democracy promotion. The focus of the article is on the ADVANCE Act of 2007, a legislative enactment that institutionalized democracy promotion in the State Department. After explicating the key provisions of this Act, as well as their implementation status, the article addresses key critiques leveled at democracy promotion, as well as areas where the Obama administration can expand on what has been accomplished thus far in this field. In the end, democracy promotion should continue to be an integral component of …

Religion, Human Rights, And Post-Secular Legal Theory, Zachary R. Calo

Scholarly Works

This paper proposes that the fundamental challenge for religious legal theory is the question of the secular and, in particular, a certain mode of secular reason that has shaped the idea of law within modernity. The fundamental ambition of modern legal thought was to sever law from a connection to a sacred cosmic and intellectual order. The idea of human rights, at least in its regnant expression, embodies this project most fully in that it has increasingly been defined as a moral tradition that stands over and against religion. This paper, by contrast, argues that the destabilization of secular meaning …

An Analysis Of China’S Human Rights Policies In Tibet: China’S Compliance With The Mandates Of International Law Regarding Civil And Political Rights, Richard Klein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Human Rights And Southern Realities, Tamara Relis

Scholarly Works

The proliferation of international human rights treaties, committees and courts over the last sixty years represents enormous achievement. International human rights laws are now asserted throughout the world by individuals of many cultures and traditions. Yet, at the same time international human rights ideas and principles continue to have difficulty in manifesting their relevance in the daily lives of those who are geographically and culturally distant from international institutions Two new books - William Twining’s Human Rights, Southern Voices: Francis Deng, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Yash Ghai, Upendra Baxi, and Helen Stacy’s Human Rights for the 21st Century - address aspects of …

The Price Of The Ottoman Failure, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The question of the implications of secularization for Christian communities in today’s Middle East is a difficult one, both because the extent of contemporary secularization in the region is contested, and because the term itself has so many different meanings. Nonetheless, a preliminary consideration imposes itself. Whatever else it means, secularization means legal equality for religious minorities, including Christians. Formal equality often exists in the Middle East today. Yet legal restrictions – apostasy prosecutions, limitations on clergy and churches, and so on – continue to pose real threats to Christians. Moreover, as Abdullahi An-Na‘im notes, ‘tension with the traditional …

The Mystery Of Life In The Laboratory Of Democracy: Personal Autonomy In State Law, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

Recent controversies, such as enactment of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance and the legalization of assisted suicide in Washington and Montana, have renewed the war over personal autonomy. Debates about the value and limits of personal autonomy also play major roles in the controversies over abortion, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage. On one side of the autonomy war, advocates of unfettered individual freedom assert that by her un-coerced and autonomous choice, the individual person determines the value of human goods such as life, health, and marriage.

On the other side, proponents of strong government restrictions on personal choice …

Jacques Maritain, Man And The State (1951), Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

From the Article

Jacques Maritain was one of the twentieth century’s most important and influential Christian philosophers and political thinkers. That said, his work, thought, and aspirations were not limited by the boundaries of any particular academic disciplines or traditions. His was, as Professor Brennan has observed, a “quest to understand the whole of reality, created and redeemed.” A great scholar of the medieval accomplishments of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, Maritain’s distinctive Christian Humanism shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Second Vatican Council, and the writing of the late Pope John Paul II.

The Challenge And Dilemma Of Charting A Course To Constitutionally Protect The Severely Mentally Ill Capital Defendant From The Death Penalty, Lyn Entzeroth

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.