The core idea underlying human rights is that everyone is inherently and equally worthy of respect as a person. The emergence of that idea has been one of the most significant international developments since the Second World War. But it is one thing to embrace something as an aspirational ideal and quite another to recognize it as enforceable law. The continued development of the international human rights regime brings a pressing question to the fore: What role should international human rights have as law within the American legal system? The U.S. Supreme Court and the Domestic Force of International Human Rights Law examines this question through the prism of the U.S. Supreme Court's handling of controversies bearing most closely on it. It shows that the specific disputes the Court has addressed can be best understood by recognizing how each interconnects with an overarching debate over the proper role to be accorded international human rights law within American institutions. By approaching the subject from the justices' standpoint, this book reveals a divide in the Court between two fundamentally different orientations toward the domestic impact of the international human rights regime.

Since 2001, the United States and its NATO allies have been committed to helping the Afghani government build a stable and democratic country. However, the insurgency led by the Taliban and fueled by Afghanistan's illicit opium industry is unraveling these positive developments, undermining the central government and threatening to make Afghanistan once again, a safe haven for terrorists and their organizations. Efforts by coalition forces have been hampered due to a shortage of funding and manpower mostly attributed to the simultaneous operations and attention given to the operations in Iraq. The lack of troops and resources has resulted in a security vacuum which the Taliban has filled. Regaining and establishing security while simultaneously interdicting opium after it has been harvested are the coalition's best means of significantly reducing the Taliban's funding source and weakening the insurgency. In achieving the objectives of security and opium reduction, coalition forces must be keenly aware of both the desired and undesired effects that their military operations have on the Afghani peoples and how those effects contribute towards Afghanistan's strategic political end state of winning the support of the Afghani people and defeating the insurgency.