Focusing on contemporary debates in philosophy and legal theory, this ground-breaking book provides a compelling enquiry into the nature of human dignity. The author not only illustrates that dignity is a concept that can extend our understanding of our environmental impacts and duties, but also highlights how our reliance on and relatedness to the environment further extends and enhances our understanding of dignity itself. Against the background of current global threats to the realisation of rights, including severe environmental degradation and depleted reserves of essential natural resources, this innovative book considers whether dignity has any role to play in addressing these new problems, as well as in securing environmental rights and greater environmental care. The author provides an astute examination of important developments in human and environmental rights across a range of jurisdictions and levels, and considers whether human dignity should play a more central role in judicial considerations regarding environmental rights and environmental threats to human rights. Eminently engaging, this forward-thinking book will prove a critical read for legal academics and scholars with an interest in human dignity and environmental rights, as well as judicial reasoning and legal philosophy more widely. Its practical presentation of recent developments will also be of great importance to practitioners and policy-makers working in human rights and environmental law.

The "superb" (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan's words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John's father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation's prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan's dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan's Plessy dissent his "Bible"--and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan's words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a "magnificent" (Douglas Brinkley) and "thoroughly researched" (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system's most significant failures and most inspiring successes.

This book provides a detailed analysis, within an EU setting, of what we may mean by the phrase 'consumer citizen'. It examines the characterizations of the consumer in EU law and policy and argues the case for a limited conflation of the hitherto distinct concepts of the consumer and the citizen. As a basis for the model of consumer citizenship practice introduced in this book, ideas of the politicized consumer are discussed in parallel with legal and theoretical concepts of citizenship. The author's discussion then moves on to examine ideas of territorial and membership dimensions of European consumer citizenship and the policy initiatives that help define and encourage the consumer citizenship role. As the detail becomes clear a set of four related and interdependent normative influences on consumer citizenship practice are set into a framework that will provide a functional reference tool for policy makers and academic researchers.

This book presents a new constitutional argument for the legitimacy of evolutive interpretation of the ECHR. It constructs a model, in which evolutive and static constitutional principles are balanced with each other. The author argues that there are three possible interpretive approaches in time-sensitive interpretations of the ECHR, but that only one of them is justifiable by reference to the constitutional principles of the ECHR in every single case. The ECHR's constitutional principles either require an evolutive or static interpretation or they do not establish a preference relation at all, which leads to a margin of appreciation of the member states in the interpretation of the Convention. The balancing model requires the determination of the weights of the competing evolutive and static constitutional principles. For this purpose, the author defines weighting factors for determining the importance of evolutive or static interpretation in a concrete case.

The European Commission has claimed that 'Solidarity is part of how European society works...'. But how are we to understand solidarity, and what are its implications to Government policy? Promoting Solidarity in the European Union addresses the question of what solidarity might mean today and its relevance to the purposes of the European Union and the way it functions. Is solidarity just a slogan or can it have meaningful legal and policy content? This book brings together contributions from leading scholars in law, politics and sociology to discuss an idea that is coming under fresh scrutiny at a time when the EU's direction following the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty is hotly debated. The authors engage with both the content and limitations of solidarity as a concept in political and legal debate, and its application to specific fields such as migration, education and pensions policies.
Promoting Solidarity in the European Union provides a thoughtful and provocative analysis of the power and potential of solidarity, applying a sceptical and rigorous assessment of the conditions necessary for it to make a difference to the European political and legal space at a time when traditional manifestations of national solidarity (e.g. in health care) are perceived to be under threat from EU market liberalization policies. A number of contributions consider whether an EU concept of solidarity is possible and how that might affect the balance between market and social priorities for the Union's future.
If the EU is to be more than just a market, promoting solidarity as a value and a principle has a key role. This rich collection of essays explores how solidarity might fulfil its status as a core value for the Union.

This thought-provoking book critically analyses how the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement on Refugees affects the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Bringing together an in-depth examination of both EU and Turkish law and fieldwork data within a theoretical human rights framework, Hulya Kaya discusses the operational realities and failures of the agreement between Turkey and the EU from a socio-legal perspective. This timely book provides important evidence that refugee protection in the region of origin is not an effective solution to the refugee protection crisis, and casts doubt on the capacity of the agreement to contribute to fair burden sharing between states. Kaya illuminates the practical and legal difficulties that refugees experience, and draws upon the political theory of Hannah Arendt to argue that the situation constitutes a further form of violence against refugees by hindering their ability to claim and exercise their fundamental human rights. Scholars and doctoral students specialising in refugee law and migration studies, as well as human rights lawyers, will find this book to be crucial reading. It will also be of interest to human rights advocates and those working in international organisations and NGOs in this area, alongside policy makers in the EU and Turkey.

It is a familiar and irrefutable fact that the world we live in today is marked with divisions. Border posts, frontier patrols, and elaborate fencing establish the dividing lines between the territory of one country and the next. Meanwhile, partitions have also been created between people, even though individuals do not exist as isolated beings. They are connected to one country or another through the legal bond of membership known as nationality. However, these divisions are not watertight. There are also individuals who remain unclaimed by any country. These are the world's stateless persons. Some fifty years ago, the international community adopted a pair of instruments to tackle the anomaly that is statelessness: the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The former was designed to offer a minimum standard of protection to those individuals who found themselves without a nationality, while the latter was crafted in order to prevent new cases of statelessness from arising. However, these documents were quickly forgotten and failed to have any real impact. Then, at the turn of the millennium, a deepening understanding of the severity and potential implications of statelessness as well as the emergence of several large, new caseloads of stateless persons spurred the international community to renew its attempts to tackle the issue. It is the current growing preoccupation with the plight of the stateless that offered an opportune moment to reflect upon the question as to whether the international community now has the necessary tools at its disposal to respond effectively to the issue of statelessness. Nationality Matters is devoted to answering that question by investigating in detail both the enduring value of the two tailor-made statelessness conventions, as well as ascertaining what other areas of international law in particular human rights law have to offer in answer to the phenomenon of statelessness. Laura van Waas has been selected as a recipient of the Max van der Stoel Human Rights Award 2009 for this book.

Human rights tend to focus on the relationship between the individual and the state the individual is the rights-holder, the state is the duty-holder. Children's rights bring a third player much more into the picture, namely the parents. Although, legally speaking, they are not duty-holders under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, parents do have a number of responsibilities under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other human rights instruments. Child rearing may still be considered by many to be within the private domain, i.e. a matter of concern only within the relationship between children and their parents, with the exception of instances of child abuse or neglect. However, States may be obligated to turn parental responsibilities into national legal duties if this is needed to improve the legal and social position of children. In this volume, child-rearing responsibilities are examined in the light of children's rights and other human rights. All the contributions focus in particular on the proposal to introduce an upbringing (or parenting) pledge. The upbringing pledge contains not only a statement of lasting commitment towards the child, but also an explicit declaration of commitment to respect and promote the rights of the child both as a person and as a human being who is utterly dependent upon parents for wellbeing and the development of his or her personality. By means of the upbringing pledge as a child rights-based social institution, the responsibilities of society and the state towards both parents and children are re-affirmed as well.

This textbook comprehensively examines and analyses the interpretation and application of the United Kingdom's Human Rights Act 1998. The third edition has been fully updated to include the last seven years of case law. Part I covers key procedural issues including: the background to the Act; the relationship between UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights; the definition of victim and public authority; determining incompatibility including deference and proportionality; the impact of the Act on primary legislation; and damages and other remedies for the violation of Convention rights. In Part II of the book, the Convention rights, as interpreted and applied by United Kingdom courts, are examined in detail. All of the key Convention rights are discussed including: the right to life; freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; the right to liberty; fair trial; the rights to private life, family life and home; freedom of religion and belief; freedom of expression; the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions; and the right to freedom from discrimination in the enjoyment of Convention rights. The third edition of Human Rights Law will be invaluable for those teaching, studying and practising in the areas of United Kingdom human rights law, constitutional law and administrative law.

Transforming Citizenships engages the performativity of citizenship as it relates to transgender individuals and advocacy groups. Instead of reading the law as a set of self-executing discourses, Isaac West takes up transgender rights claims as performative productions of complex legal subjectivities capable of queering accepted understandings of genders, sexualities, and the normative forces of the law. Drawing on an expansive archive, from the correspondence of a transwoman arrested for using a public bathroom in Los Angeles in 1954 to contemporary lobbying efforts of national transgender advocacy organizations, West advances a rethinking of law as capacious rhetorics of citizenship, justice, equality, and freedom. When approached from this perspective, citizenship can be recuperated from its status as the bad object of queer politics to better understand how legal discourses open up sites for identification across identity categories and enable political activities that escape the analytics of heteronormativity and homonationalism. Isaac West is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.

Stereotypes are beliefs about groups of people. Some examples, taken from human rights case law, are the notions that 'Roma are thieves', 'women are responsible for childcare', and 'people with a mental disability are incapable of forming political opinions'. Increasingly, human rights monitoring bodies including the European and inter-American human rights courts, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination voice concerns about stereotyping and warn States not to enforce harmful stereotypes. Human rights bodies thus appear to be starting to realise what social psychologists discovered a long time ago: that stereotypes underlie inequality and discrimination. Despite their relevance and their legal momentum, however, stereotypes have so far received little attention from human rights law scholars. This volume is the first one to broadly analyse stereotypes as a human rights issue. The scope of the book includes different stereotyping grounds such as race, gender, and disability. Moreover, this book examines stereotyping approaches across a broad range of supranational human rights monitoring bodies, including the United Nations human rights treaty system as well as the regional systems that are most developed when it comes to addressing stereotypes: the Council of Europe and the inter-American system.

The term "gender" was first distinguished from "sex" in the 1950s when psychologists began to discuss the idea of "gender roles," behaviors and responsibilities given to people by a society rather than flowing from their biology. Since then, leaders across disciplines have sought to better understand the roles of biology, psychology, and culture on gender. New language has emerged alongside rich scientific inquiry and research. Increased visibility of transgender and nonbinary communities has brought awareness to a range of gender diverse experiences, while legal battles, wage disparities, and health inequities continue to prove gender's relevancy in today's world. In this book, Laura Erickson-Schroth and Benjamin Davis guide readers through the knowns and unknowns of gender, asking questions such as: What is the difference between sex, gender identity, and gender expression? Were ancient societies matriarchal? How different are male and female brains, really? What role does language play in the ways we think about gender? What do we know about sex and gender in non-human species? What are the current frontiers in gender equality? Gender: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) is an easy-to-read guide that takes readers on a much-needed tour of perspectives on gender and identity in the 21st century.The book is written in a question-and-answer format, and Erickson-Schroth and Davis cover topics such as current definitions; the history of gender as concept; therole of biology, psychology, and culture on gender; and gender norms over time and across the globe.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the term 'privacy' gained new prominence around the world, but in the legal arena it is still a concept in 'disarray'. Enclosing it within legal frameworks seems to be a particularly difficult task in the employment context, where encroachments upon privacy are not only potentially more frequent, but also, and most importantly, qualitatively different from those taking place in other areas of modern society. This book suggests that these problems can only be addressed by the development of a holistic approach to its protection, an approach that addresses the issue of not only contemporary regulation but also the conceptualization, adjudication, and common (public) perception of employees' privacy. The book draws on a comprehensive analysis of the conceptual as well as regulatory convergences and divergences between European, American and Canadian models of privacy protection, to reconsider the conceptual and normative foundations of the contemporary paradigm of employees' privacy and to elucidate the pillars of a holistic approach to the protection of right to privacy in employment.

This original and provocative book looks at an important constitutional freedom that today is largely forgotten: the right of assembly. While this right lay at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history--abolitionism, women's suffrage, the labor and civil rights movements--courts now prefer to speak about the freedoms of association and speech. But the right of "expressive association" undermines protections for groups whose purposes are demonstrable not by speech or expression but through ways of being. John D. Inazu demonstrates that the forgetting of assembly and the embrace of association lose sight of important dimensions of our constitutional tradition.

This book offers a unique insight into the global trend towards the commodification of citizenship. In Cyprus, as well as many other countries, foreign investors can become naturalised citizens for a price. Exploring the fact that there is now a price tag to the national (and therefore EU) passport, the book examines the nature of citizenship alongside the unequal interactions between global political economy and national political communities. The analysis stresses how golden passports rearrange common sensibilities about the principle of political equality through citizenship. The book is a rare ethnography of the transactional relations between Russian investors who wish to acquire the Cypriot passport and their Cypriot 'facilitators', the local professionals who ease the process. The book argues that golden passports are the continuation of offshoring by other means, as now not only capital but capitalists too, 'have no country'. -- .

Since the early 1990s, the European Union has included human rights conditionality clauses in its association agreements and other international trade and cooperation agreements. The purpose of these clauses is to entitle a party to take appropriate measures, including suspension of the agreement, in the event that the other party violates human rights or democratic principles. This book provides an account of the evolution of these clauses, their scope and their operation, and analyses the EU's responsibility, under international law, to implement these clauses domestically. Based on this examination, the book explores the extent to which the EU has the legislative competence to include such clauses in its international agreements, and concludes by considering the implications of ultra vires agreements in EU law. This study offers theoretical insights into aspects of international law as well as EU constitutional and external relations law. Its practical conclusions have major implications not only for the application of human rights clauses, but also for the EU's international treaty practice more generally. Dr Lorand Bartels brings his expertise in international law to this engaging discussion of the EU's use of human rights conditionality in its international agreements.

The European Union's jurisprudence is responsible for a complex body of human rights law which pursues a busy, multi-tiered agenda and is essential for the lawful and the effective operation and development of the EU polity and its legal order. This innovative book investigates the character of EU human rights law as shaped by the interplay between interpretation and context in the jurisprudence of EU courts.Marton Varju offers a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of EU human rights case law. Providing a comprehensive analytical framework for the jurisprudence he sheds new light on key EU constitutional principles and reveals the complex character of the legal analysis. He distinguishes between different applications of human rights to reveal the 'relational' character of EU human rights law. Examining the interpretative considerations and practices followed by EU courts in their human rights jurisprudence, the author discusses their impact on the protection of human rights in the difficult constitutional and governance terrain of the EU. Identifying the considerations and agendas behind EU human rights law which should be taken into account in EU litigation, this unique and timely book will be of great interest to practitioners in the field and is essential reading for academics and postgraduate students in EU constitutional law. Contents: Preface 1. European Union Human Rights Law: The Dynamics of Interpretation and Context 2. The Rule of Law and Human Rights in the EU 3. Regulation and Human Rights in the EU 4. The Regulation of Human Rights in the EU 5. Justice and Human Rights in the EU 6. European Union Procedures and Human Rights 7. The Multi-layered Character of EU Human Rights Law 8. The Law of the ECHR and Human Rights in the EU 9. European Union Human Rights Law: The Dynamics of Interpretation and Context - Conclusions Index

Felix Cohen (1907-1953) was a leading architect of the Indian New Deal and steadfast champion of American Indian rights. Appointed to the Department of the Interior in 1933, he helped draft the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) and chaired a committee charged with assisting tribes in organizing their governments. His ""Basic Memorandum on Drafting of Tribal Constitutions,"" submitted in November 1934, provided practical guidelines for that effort.Largely forgotten until Cohen's papers were released more than half a century later, the memorandum now receives the attention it has long deserved. David E. Wilkins presents the entire work, edited and introduced with an essay that describes its origins and places it in historical context. Cohen recommended that each tribe consider preserving ancient traditions that offered wisdom to those drafting constitutions. Strongly opposed to ""sending out canned constitutions from Washington,"" he offered ideas for incorporating Indigenous political, social, and cultural knowledge and structure into new tribal constitutions. On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions shows that concepts of Indigenous autonomy and self-governance have been vital to Native nations throughout history. As today's tribal governments undertake reform, Cohen's memorandum again offers a wealth of insight on how best to amend previous constitutions. It also helps scholars better understand the historic policy shift brought about by the Indian Reorganization Act.

The lawyers and legal commentators who contribute to We Dissent unanimously agree that during Chief Justice William Rehnquist's nineteen-year tenure, the Supreme Court failed to adequately protect civil liberties and civil rights. This is evident in majority opinions written for numerous cases heard by the Rehnquist Court, and eight of those cases are re-examined here, with contributors offering dissents to the Court's decisions. The Supreme Court opinions criticized in We Dissent suggest that the Rehnquist Court placed the interests of government above the people, and as the dissents in this book demonstrate, the Court strayed far from our constitutional ideals when it abandoned its commitment to the protection of the individual rights of Americans.

Each chapter focuses on a different case--ranging from torture to search and seizure, and from racial profiling to the freedom of political expression--with contributors summarizing the case and the decision, and then offering their own dissent to the majority opinion. For some cases featured in the book, the Court's majority decisions were unanimous, so readers can see here for the first time what a dissent might have looked like. In other cases, contributors offer alternative dissents to the minority opinion, thereby widening the scope of opposition to key civil liberties decision made by the Rehnquist Court.

Taken together, the dissents in this unique book address the pressing issue of Constitutional protection of individual freedom, and present a vision of constitutional law in the United States that differs considerably from the recent jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court.

Contributors: Michael Avery, Erwin Chemerinsky, Marjorie Cohn, Tracey Maclin, Eva Paterson, Jamin Raskin, David Rudovsky, Susan Kiyomi Serrano, and Abbe Smith.

Getting By offers an integrated, critical account of the federal laws and programs that most directly affect poor and low-income people in the United States-the unemployed, the underemployed, and the low-wage employed, whether working in or outside the home. The central aim is to provide a resource for individuals and groups trying to access benefits, secure rights and protections, and mobilize for economic justice. The topics covered include cash assistance, employment and labor rights, food assistance, health care, education, consumer and banking law, housing assistance, rights in public places, access to justice, and voting rights. This comprehensive volume is appropriate for law school and undergraduate courses, and is a vital resource for policy makers, journalists, and others interested in social welfare policy in the United States.

This volume is the only book which focuses on the impact of judicial review in the social welfare field. It comprises a selection of essays by academics and practitioners who have an interest in the operation, impact and future development of judicial review in a number of social welfare areas: homelessness, housing benefit, mental health, health care, social security, the discretionary social fund, immigration, prisoners, education and gypsy site provision. Two contributions address issues relating to the supervisory jurisdiction in the Scottish Court of Session and the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland.

Each contributor outlines the background and development of judicial review in their particular field followed by commentary on the operation of the judicial review remedy and various theoretical and practical concerns such as the impact of judicial review on organizational behaviour and its effect on the exercise of discretionary powers. The essays deal with the political and policy context of judicial review challenge, and the shifting balance of advantage offered to social welfare campaigners. The limitations of judicial review and the comparative merits of statutory appellate schemes are also examined. The contributors attempt to identify future areas for research and a concluding chapter draws together the common themes.

Philosopher Kings? The Adjudication of Conflicting Human Rights and Social Values, by George C. Christie, examines the attempts by courts to sort out conflicts involving freedom of expression, including religious expression, on the one hand, and rights to privacy and other important social values on the other. It approaches the subject from a comparative perspective, using principally cases decided by European and United States courts.
A significant part of this book analyzes conflicts between freedom of expression and the right to privacy. In a world in which, freedom of expression and privacy are said to be of equal value, the book explores whether it is possible to develop, through case-by-case adjudication, a legal regime which can give clear direction as to what expression is or is not permitted. Otherwise, if such a regime proves impossible, in the guise of recognizing the equal value of expression and privacy, privacy may become de facto the preferred value.