Human rights are considered one of the big ideas of the early twenty-first century. This book presents in an authoritative and readable form the variety of platforms on which human rights law is practiced today, reflecting also on the dynamic inter-relationships that exist between these various levels. The collection has a critical edge. The chapters engage with how human rights law has developed in its various subfields, what (if anything) has been achieved and at what cost, in terms of expected or produced unexpected side-effects. The authors pass judgment about the consistency, efficacy and success of human rights law (set against the standards of the field itself or other external goals). Written by world-class academics, this Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of human rights law.

Preventive detention as a counter-terrorism tool is fraught with conceptual and procedural problems and risks of misuse, excess and abuse. Many have debated the inadequacies of the current legal frameworks for detention, and the need for finding the most appropriate legal model to govern detention of terror suspects that might serve as a global paradigm. This book offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of the detention of terror suspects under domestic criminal law, the law of armed conflict and international human rights law. The book looks comparatively at the law in a number of key jurisdictions including the USA, the UK, Israel, France, India, Australia and Canada and in turn compares this to preventive detention under the law of armed conflict and various human rights treaties. The book demonstrates that the procedures governing the use of preventive detention are deficient in each framework and that these deficiencies often have an adverse and serious impact on the human rights of detainees, thereby delegitimizing the use of preventive detention. Based on her investigation Diane Webber puts forward a new approach to preventive detention, setting out ten key minimum criteria drawn from international human rights principles and best practices from domestic laws. The minimum criteria are designed to cure the current flaws and deficiencies and provide a base line of guidance for the many countries that choose to use preventive detention, in a way that both respects human rights and maintains security.

This timely book explores the relationship between private law and globalization. It examines the consequences of the fact that law making now takes place in a globalized world which increasingly leads to questions of accountability and legitimacy of the law making process. Within this work, European and South African scholars deal with the relationship between private law and globalization in fourteen innovative chapters, addressing inter alia globalization, democracy and accountability, harmonization versus decentralization, public law issues, corporate governance, procedural issues as well as human rights and the environment. This well-documented and original study will be a valuable resource for academics and legal practitioners as well as students. Specialists in private law, transnational law, international law and legal theory should also not be without this important book.

This open access book asks whether there is space for particularism in a constitutional democracy which would limit the implementation of EU law. National identity claims are a key factor in shaping our times and the ongoing evolution of the European Union. To assess their impact this collection focuses on the jurisprudence of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, as they play an essential role in giving life to particularism. By taking particularism as the prism through which they explore the question, the contributors offer a new analytical scheme to evaluate the judicial invocation of identity. This requires an interdisciplinary approach: the study draws on comparative constitutional law, theory, comparative-empirical material and normative-philosophical perspectives. This is a fresh and thought-provoking new study on an increasingly important question in EU law. The ebook editions of this book are available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Years of surveillance-related leaks from US whistle blower Edward Snowden have fuelled an international debate on privacy, spying, and Internet surveillance. Much of the focus has centered on the role of the US National Security Agency, yet there is an important Canadian side to the story. The Communications Security Establishment, the Canadian counterpart to the NSA, has played an active role in surveillance activities both at home and abroad, raising a host of challenging legal and policy questions. With contributions by leading experts in the field, Law, Privacy and Surveillance in Canada in the Post-Snowden Era is the right book at the right time: From the effectiveness of accountability and oversight programs to the legal issues raised by metadata collection to the privacy challenges surrounding new technologies, this book explores current issues torn from the headlines with a uniquely Canadian perspective.

For the first time in 400 years a number of leading common law nations have, fairly simultaneously, embarked on charity law reform leading to an encoding of key definitional matters in charity legislation. This book provides an analysis of international case law developments on the ever growing range of issues now being generated by clashes between human rights, religion and charity law. Kerry O'Halloran identifies and assesses the agenda of 'moral imperatives', such as abortion and gay marriage that delineate the legal interface and considers their significance for those with and those without religious belief. By assessing jurisdictional differences in the law relating to religion/human rights/charity the author provides a picture of the evolving 'culture wars' that now typify and differentiates societies in western nations including the USA, England and Wales, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Does "Asian American" denote an ethnic or racial identification? Is a person of mixed ancestry, the child of Euro- and Asian American parents, Asian American? What does it mean to refer to first generation Hmong refugees and fifth generation Chinese Americans both as Asian American?

In Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation State, Robert Chang examines the current discourse on race and law and the implications of postmodern theory and affirmative action-all of which have largely excluded Asian Americans-in order to develop a theory of critical Asian American legal studies.

Demonstrating that the ongoing debate surrounding multiculturalism and immigration in the U.S. is really a struggle over the meaning of "America," Chang reveals how the construction of Asian American-ness has become a necessary component in stabilizing a national American identity-- a fact Chang criticizes as harmful to Asian Americans. Defining the many "borders" that operate in positive and negative ways to construct America as we know it, Chang analyzes the position of Asian Americans within America's black/white racial paradigm, how "the family" operates as a stand-in for race and nation, and how the figure of the immigrant embodies a central contradiction in allegories of America.

"Has profound political implications for race relations in the new century"
"--Michigan Law Review, May 2001"

In Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition, Justin Buckley Dyer provides a succinct account of the development of American antislavery constitutionalism in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the context of recent revisionist scholarship, Dyer argues that the theoretical foundations of American constitutionalism - which he identifies with principles of natural law - were antagonistic to slavery. Still, the continued existence of slavery in the nineteenth century created a tension between practice and principle. In a series of case studies, Dyer reconstructs the constitutional arguments of prominent antislavery thinkers such as John Quincy Adams, John McLean, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who collectively sought to overcome the legacy of slavery by emphasizing the natural law foundations of American constitutionalism. What emerges is a convoluted understanding of American constitutional development that challenges traditional narratives of linear progress while highlighting the centrality of natural law to America's greatest constitutional crisis.

Is there universalism of human rights? If so, what are its scope and limits? This book is a doctrinal attempt to define universalism of human rights, as well as its scope and limits. The book presents tests of universalism on international, regional and national constitutional levels. It is maintained that universalism of human rights is both a 'concept' and a 'normative reality'. The normative character of human rights is scrutinized through the study of international and regional agreements as well as national constitutions. As a consequence, limitations of normativity are identified, usually on the international level, and take the form of exceptions, reservations, and interpretations. The book is based on the General and National Reports which were originally presented at the 18th International Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Washington D.C. 2010.

This book is about privacy interests in English tort law. Despite the recent recognition of a misuse of private information tort, English law remains underdeveloped. The presence of gaps in the law can be explained, to some extent, by a failure on the part of courts and legal academics to reflect on the meaning of privacy. Through comparative, critical and historical analysis, this book seeks to refine our understanding of privacy by considering our shared experience of it. To this end, the book draws on the work of Norbert Elias and Karl Popper, among others, and compares the English law of privacy with the highly elaborate German law. In doing so, the book reaches the conclusion that an unfortunate consequence of the way English privacy law has developed is that it gives the impression that justice is only for the rich and famous. If English courts are to ensure equalitarian justice, the book argues that they must reflect on the value of privacy and explore the bounds of legal possibility.

Theft, deception, bribery, rogue trading and money laundering present massive and apparently insuperable problems for governments worldwide. On a national and international scale, these types of activities may have social, economic and political repercussions. This new book is primarily concerned with the impact of these activities upon private individuals. The text analyses the position of the victim, the fraudster, recipients of property and accessories. The focus is upon the civil law aspects of fraud and the increasing significance of money laundering legislation and the law of human rights. The main theme of this book is an examination of the extent to which fraudulent activity triggers special rules which are exceptions to the general principles of civil law. There is the further question of the extent to which theft and fraud affect transactions which are interlinked. Policy issues are weighed in the balance, such as the protection of property rights against the need to ensure the free circulation of goods and the security of good faith purchase, and the demand for certainty in the law against the need to deter fraud.

As the 2020s began, protestors filled the streets, politicians clashed over how to respond to a global pandemic, and new scrutiny was placed on what rights US citizens should be afforded. Newly revised and expanded to address immigration, gay rights, privacy rights, affirmative action, and more, The Bill of Rights in Modern America provides clear insights into the issues currently shaping the United States. Essays explore the law and history behind contentious debates over such topics as gun rights, limits on the powers of law enforcement, the death penalty, abortion, and states' rights. Accessible and easy to read, the discerning research offered in The Bill of Rights in Modern America will help inform critical discussions for years to come.

How can businesses and their shareholders avoid moral and legal complicity in human rights violations? This central and contemporary issue in the field of ethics, politics and law is of concern to intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and to many NGOs, as well as investors and employees. In this volume legal scholars and political philosophers identify and address the intertwined issues of moral and legal complicity in human rights violations by companies and those who invest in them. By describing the legal aspects of human rights violations in the corporate sphere, addressing the complicity of companies with regard to such norms and exploring the influence of investors, the book provides a thorough introduction to corporate social responsibility. Human Rights, Corporate Complicity and Disinvestment will set the research agenda on socially responsible investment for years to come.

Theories of gender justice in the twenty-first century must engage with global economic and social processes. Using concepts from economic analysis associated with global commodity chains and feminist ethics of care, Ann Stewart considers the way in which 'gender contracts' relating to work and care contribute to gender inequalities worldwide. She explores how economies in the global north stimulate desires and create deficits in care and belonging which are met through transnational movements and traces the way in which transnational economic processes, discourses of rights and care create relationships between global south and north. African women produce fruit and flowers for European consumption; body workers migrate to meet deficits in 'affect' through provision of care and sex; British-Asian families seek belonging through transnational marriages.

This book brings to light emerging evidence of a shift toward a fuller engagement with international human rights norms and their application to domestic policy dilemmas in the United States. The volume offers a rich history, spanning close to three centuries, of the marginalization of human rights discourse in the United States. Contributors analyze particular cases of U.S. human rights advocacy aimed at addressing persistent inequalities within the United States itself, including advocacy on the rights of persons with disabilities; indigenous peoples; lone mother-headed families; incarcerated persons; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people; and those displaced by natural disasters, most notably Hurricane Katrina. The book also explores key arenas in which legal scholars, policy practitioners, and grassroots activists are challenging multiple divides between public and private spheres (for example, in connection with children's rights and domestic violence) and between public and private sectors (specifically, in relation to healthcare and business and human rights).

Judicial Reasoning under the UK Human Rights Act is a collection of essays written by leading experts in the field, which examines judicial decision-making under the UK's de facto Bill of Rights. The book focuses both on changes in areas of substantive law and the techniques of judicial reasoning adopted to implement the Act. The contributors therefore consider first general Convention and Human Rights Act concepts - statutory interpretation, horizontal effect, judicial review, deference, the reception of Strasbourg case-law - since they arise across all areas of substantive law. They then proceed to examine not only the use of such concepts in particular fields of law (privacy, family law, clashing rights, discrimination and criminal procedure), but also the modes of reasoning by which judges seek to bridge the divide between familiar common law and statutory doctrines and those in the Convention.

Is there still a right to seek asylum in a globalised world? Migration control has increasingly moved to the high seas or the territory of transit and origin countries, and is now commonly outsourced to private actors. Under threat of financial penalties airlines today reject any passenger not in possession of a valid visa, and private contractors are used to run detention centres and man border crossings. In this volume Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen examines the impact of these new practices for refugees' access to asylum. A systematic analysis is provided of the reach and limits of international refugee law when migration control is carried out extraterritorially or by non-state actors. State practice from around the globe and case law from all the major human rights institutions is discussed. The arguments are further linked to wider debates in human rights, general international law and political science.

Defining the Family: Law, Technology, and Reproduction in an Uneasy Age provides a sweeping portrait of the family in American law from the nineteenth century to the present. The family today has come to be defined by individuality and choice. Pre-nuptial agreements, non-marital cohabitation, gay and lesbian marriages have all profoundly altered our ideas about marriage and family. In the last few years, reproductive technology and surrogacy have accelerated this process of change at a breathtaking rate. Once simple questions have taken on a dizzying complexity: Who are the real parents of a child? What are the relationships and responsibilities between a child, the woman who carried it to term, and the egg donor? Between viable sperm and the wife of a dead donor? The courts and the law have been wildly inconsistent and indecisive when grappling with these questions. Should these cases be decided in light of laws governing contracts and property? Or it is more appropriate to act in the best interests of the child, even if that child is unborn, or even unconceived? No longer merely settling disputes among family members, the law is now seeing its own role expand, to the point where it is asked to regulate situations unprecedented in human history. Janet L. Dolgin charts the response of the law to modern reproductive technology both as it transforms our image of the family and is itself transformed by the tide of social forces.

Human dignity is one of the most challenging and exciting ideas for lawyers and political philosophers in the twenty-first century. Even though it is rapidly emerging as a core concept across legal systems, and is the first foundational value of the European Union and its overarching human rights commitment under the Lisbon Treaty, human dignity is still little understood and often mistrusted. Based on extensive comparative and cross-disciplinary research, this path-breaking monograph provides an innovative and critical investigation of human dignity's origins, development and above all its potential at the heart of European constitutionalism today. Grounding its analysis in the connections among human dignity, human rights, constitutional law and democracy, this book argues that human dignity's varied and increasing uses point to a deep transformation of European constitutionalism. At its heart are the construction and protection of constitutional time, and the multi-dimensional definition of humanity as human beings, citizens and workers. Anchored in a detailed comparative study of case law, including the two European supranational courts and domestic constitutional courts, especially those of Germany, the UK, France and Hungary, this monograph argues for a new understanding of European constitutionalism as a form of humanism.

This reinterpretation of the legal status of foreigners in medieval England boldly rejects the canonical view which has for centuries dominated the imagination of historians and laymen alike. Keechang Kim proposes an understanding of the genesis of the modern legal regime and the important distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Making full use of medieval and early modern sources, Kim offers a compelling argument that the late medieval changes in legal treatment of foreigners are vital to an understanding of the shift of focus from status to the State, and that the historical foundation of the modern state system should be sought in this shift of outlook. The book contains a re-evaluation of the legal aspects of feudalism, examining, in particular, how the feudal legal arguments were transformed by the political theology of the Middle Ages to become the basis of the modern legal outlook.

In this important new book, Michael J. Perry examines three of the most disputed constitutional issues of our time: capital punishment, state laws banning abortion, and state policies denying the benefit of law to same-sex unions. The author, a leading constitutional scholar, explains that if a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court believes that a law violates the Constitution, it does not necessarily follow that the Court should rule that the law is unconstitutional. In cases in which it is argued that a law violates the Constitution, the Supreme Court must decide which of two importantly different questions it should address: (1) Is the challenged law unconstitutional? (2) Is the lawmakers' judgment that the challenged law is constitutional a reasonable judgment? (One can answer both questions in the affirmative.) By focusing on the death penalty, abortion, and same-sex unions, Perry provides illuminating new perspectives not only on moral controversies that implicate one or more constitutionally entrenched human rights, but also on the fundamental question of the Supreme Court's proper role in adjudicating such controversies.

European Union equality and anti-discrimination law were revolutionized by the incorporation of Article 13 into the EC Treaty, adding new anti-discrimination grounds and new possibilities. This comprehensive 2007 volume provides a fresh approach to Article 13 and its directives; it adopts a contextual framework to equality and anti-discrimination law in the European Union. Part I deals with the evolution of Article 13, demographic and social change and the inter-relationship between European Equality Law and Human Rights. Part II contains expert essays on each of the Article 13 anti-discrimination grounds: sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation, with common themes weaving throughout. This book will be of interest to everyone concerned with combating discrimination, academics, NGOs, lawyers, human resource professionals, employers, employees, research students and many others in the European Union and beyond.

We now live in a world which thinks through the legislative implications of criminal justice with one eye on human rights. "Human Rights and the Criminal Justice System "provides comprehensive coverage of human rights as it relates to the contemporary criminal justice system. As well as being a significant aspect of international governance and global justice, Amatrudo and Blake argue here that human rights have also eclipsed the rhetoric of religion in contemporary moral discussion. This book explores topics such as terrorism, race, and the rights of prisoners, as well as existing legal structures, court practices, and the developing literature in criminology, law and political science, in order to critically review the relationship between the developing body of human rights theory and practice, and the criminal justice system.

This book will be of considerable interest to those with academic concerns in this area; as well as providing an accessible, yet sophisticated, resource for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate human rights courses.

Given jurisdiction over race and national origin but not religion, federal agents have had to determine whether Jewish Americans constitute a race or national origin group. They have been unable to do so. This has led to enforcement paralysis, as well as explosive internal confrontations and recriminations within the federal government. This book examines the legal and policy issues behind the ambiguity involved with civil rights protections for Jewish students. Written by a former senior government official, this book reveals the extent of this problem and presents a workable legal solution.