Normal Life

Normal Life

Author: Dean Spade

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2015-07-23

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 082237479X

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Revised and Expanded Edition Wait—what's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. In the new afterword to this revised and expanded edition, Spade notes the rapid mainstreaming of trans politics and finds that his predictions that gaining legal recognition will fail to benefit trans populations are coming to fruition. Spade examines recent efforts by the Obama administration and trans equality advocates to "pinkwash" state violence by articulating the US military and prison systems as sites for trans inclusion reforms. In the context of recent increased mainstream visibility of trans people and trans politics, Spade continues to advocate for the dismantling of systems of state violence that shorten the lives of trans people. Now more than ever, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.


Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice

Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice

Author: Radhika Balakrishnan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-31

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1317572114

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The dominant approach to economic policy has so far failed to adequately address the pressing challenges the world faces today: extreme poverty, widespread joblessness and precarious employment, burgeoning inequality, and large-scale environmental threats. This message was brought home forcibly by the 2008 global economic crisis. Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice shows how human rights have the potential to transform economic thinking and policy-making with far-reaching consequences for social justice. The authors make the case for a new normative and analytical framework, based on a broader range of objectives which have the potential to increase the substantive freedoms and choices people enjoy in the course of their lives and not on not upon narrow goals such as the growth of gross domestic product. The book covers a range of issues including inequality, fiscal and monetary policy, international development assistance, financial markets, globalization, and economic instability. This new approach allows for a complex interaction between individual rights, collective rights and collective action, as well as encompassing a legal framework which offers formal mechanisms through which unjust policy can be protested. This highly original and accessible book will be essential reading for human rights advocates, economists, policy-makers and those working on questions of social justice.


Rethinking Human Rights

Rethinking Human Rights

Author: D. Chandler

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-11-26

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1403914265

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Rethinking Human Rights brings together a team of authors from fields as diverse as political theory, peace studies, international law and media studies - concerned with a new international agenda of human rights promotion. The collection presents an original and tightly argued critique of current trends and deals with a range of questions concerning the implication of human rights approaches for humanitarian aid, state sovereignty, international law, democracy and political autonomy.


Copyright Reconstructed: Rethinking Copyright’s Economic Rights in a Time of Highly Dynamic Technological and Economic Change

Copyright Reconstructed: Rethinking Copyright’s Economic Rights in a Time of Highly Dynamic Technological and Economic Change

Author: P. Bernt Hugenholtz

Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.

Published: 2018-04-11

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9041191038

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About this book: Copyright Reconstructed is the result of a collaborative research project, ‘Reconstructing Rights’ funded by Microsoft Europe, that normatively examined the core economic rights protected under EU copyright law, with the aim of realigning these rights with economic and technological realities. It follows an interdisciplinary approach, combining economic and legal methods. The book presents various concurring future models of ‘reconstructed’ copyright law. The historical evolution of copyright has led to a growing disconnect between the legal definitions of economic rights and the business and technological realities they regulate, eroding copyright’s normative content and distorting the scope of its economic rights. What’s in this book: This book is structured as follows. Following a historical chapter that illustrates how a structure of media-specific economic rights has developed in international copyright law as copyright’s catalogue of rights, a number of alternative models for reconstructing rights are presented in the form of chapters by Europe’s most respected copyright scholars and economists focusing on potentially copyright-relevant acts that lie at the borders of exclusive rights: digital resale;private copying;hyperlinking and embedding;cable retransmission; andtext and data mining. How this will help you: Offering the most incisive current thinking on copyright’s economic rights in an increasingly networked world where acts of usage of works occur on a global or regional scale rather than on a purely national territorial basis, this book will be of immeasurable value not only to academics but also to practitioners and professionals in intellectual property law. This book guides copyright lawyers and scholars in the fields of international and EU copyright law in understanding the nexus between copyright law and technological and economic change. It also helps lawmakers and judges at the European, national and international levels formulate legislative responses to the challenges of the digital environment.


Rethinking Rights

Rethinking Rights

Author: Bruce P. Frohnen

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2008-12-24

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0826266525

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As reports of genocide, terrorism, and political violence fill today’s newscasts, more attention has been given to issues of human rights—but all too often the sound bites seem overly simplistic. Many Westerners presume that non-Western peoples yearn for democratic rights, while liberal values of toleration give way to xenophobia. This book shows that the identification of rights with contemporary liberal democracy is inaccurate and questions the assumptions of many politicians and scholars that rights are self-evident in all circumstances and will overcome any conflicts of thought or interest. Rethinking Rights offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law to emphasize rights as a natural outgrowth of a social understanding of human nature and dignity. The authors argue that every person comes to consciousness in a historical and cultural milieu that must be taken into account in understanding human rights, and they describe the omnipresence of concrete, practical rights in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts. By rooting our understanding of rights in both history and the order of existence, they show that it is possible to understand rights as essential to our lives as social beings but also open to refinement within communities. An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence to clarify the experience of rights within the Western tradition. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights. Steering a middle course between radical individualist and extreme egalitarian views, Rethinking Rights proposes a new philosophy of rights appropriate to today’s world, showing that rights need to be rethought in a manner that brings them back into accord with human nature and experience so that they may again truly serve the human good. By engaging both the history of rights in the West and the multicultural challenge of rights in an international context, Rethinking Rights offers a provocative and coherent new argument to advance the field of rights studies.


Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights

Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights

Author: Lorrin R Thomas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1351678728

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Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights offers a reexamination of the history of Puerto Ricans’ political and social activism in the United States in the twentieth century. Authors Lorrin Thomas and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago survey the ways in which Puerto Ricans worked within the United States to create communities for themselves and their compatriots in times and places where dark-skinned or ‘foreign’ Americans were often unwelcome. The authors argue that the energetic Puerto Rican rights movement which rose to prominence in the late 1960s was built on a foundation of civil rights activism beginning much earlier in the century. The text contextualizes Puerto Rican activism within the broader context of twentieth-century civil rights movements, while emphasizing the characteristics and goals unique to the Puerto Rican experience. Lucid and insightful, Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights provides a much-needed introduction to a lesser-known but critically important social and political movement.


Rethinking Agency

Rethinking Agency

Author: Sumi Madhok

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-21

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 131780953X

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This book proposes a new theoretical framework for agency thinking by examining the ethical, discursive and practical engagements of a group of women development workers in north-west India with developmentalism and individual rights. Rethinking Agency asks an underexplored question, tracks the entry, encounter, experience and practice of developmentalism and individual rights, and examines their normative and political trajectory. Through an ethnography of a moral encounter with developmentalism, it raises a critical question: how do we think of agency in oppressive contexts? Further, how do issues of risk, injury, coercion and oppression alter the conceptual mechanics of agency itself? The work will be invaluable to research organisations, development practitioners, policy makers and political journalists interested in questions of gender, political empowerment, rights and political participation, and to academics and students in the fields of feminist theory, development studies, sociology, politics and gender studies.


Rethinking Rights-Based Mental Health Laws

Rethinking Rights-Based Mental Health Laws

Author: Bernadette McSherry

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2010-08-16

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1847315968

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Mental health laws exist in many countries to regulate the involuntary detention and treatment of individuals with serious mental illnesses. 'Rights-based legalism' is a term used to describe mental health laws that refer to the rights of individuals with mental illnesses somewhere in their provisions. The advent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities makes it timely to rethink the way in which the rights of individuals to autonomy and liberty are balanced against state interests in protecting individuals from harm to self or others. This collection addresses some of the current issues and problems arising from rights-based mental health laws. The chapters have been grouped in five parts as follows: - Historical Foundations - The International Human Rights Framework and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - Gaps Between Law and Practice - Review Processes and the Role of Tribunals - Access to Mental Health Services Many of the chapters in this collection emphasise the importance of moving away from the limitations of a negative rights approach to mental health laws towards more positive rights of social participation. While the law may not always be the best way through which to alleviate social and personal predicaments, legislation is paramount for the functioning of the mental health system. The aim of this collection is to encourage the enactment of legal provisions governing treatment, detention and care that are workable and conform to international human rights documents.


Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities

Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities

Author: Arthur J. Dyck

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2005-02-08

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9781589014060

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As members of various and often conflicting communities, how do we reconcile what we have come to understand as our human rights with our responsibilities toward one another? With the bright thread of individualism woven through the American psyche, where can our sense of duty toward others be found? What has happened to our love—even our concern—for our neighbor? In this revised edition of his magisterial exploration of these critical questions, renowned ethicist Arthur Dyck revisits and profoundly hones his call for the moral bonds of community. In all areas of contemporary life, be it in business, politics, health care, religion—and even in family relationships—the "right" of individuals to consider themselves first has taken precedence over our responsibilities toward others. Dyck contends that we must recast the language of rights to take into account our once natural obligations to all the communities of which we are a part. Rethinking Rights and Responsibilities, at the nexus of ethics, political theory, public policy, and law, traces how the peculiarly American formulations of the rights of the individual have assaulted our connections with, and responsibilities for, those around us. Dyck critically examines contemporary society and the relationship between responsibilities and rights, particularly as they are expressed in medicine and health care, to maintain that while indeed rights and responsibilities form the moral bonds of community, we must begin with the rudimentary task of taking better care of one another.