Questioning some of the repetitive and narrow theoretical writings on rights, a group of leading intellectuals examine human rights from philosophical, theological, historical, literary and political perspectives.
Does the apparent victory, universality and ubiquity of the idea of rights indicate that such rights have transcended all conflicts of interests and moved beyond the presumption that it is the clash of ideas that drives culture? Or has the rhetorical triumph of rights not been replicated in reality? The contributors to this book answer these questions in the context of an increasing wealth gap between the metropolitan elites and the rest, a chasm in income and chances between the rich and the poor, and walls which divide the comfortable middle classes from the 'underclass'. Why do these inequalities persist in our supposed human rights-abiding societies? In seeking to address the foundations, genealogies, meaning and impact of rights, this book captures some of the energy, breadth, power and paradoxes that make deployment of the language of human rights such an essential but changeable part of so many of our contemporary discourses.
Edited by Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein, the Foundations in Language and Law series aims beyond the traditional surveys of scholarship in law and language. Monographs in the series will provide foundational materials - theoretical, methodological, critical, practical - to advance study of important topics in the field. And even as each volume engages conceptually with current scholarship in the area, it presents original research which breaks new ground and indicates future directions for scholarship in law and language. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.
Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the "inalienable" Rights of Man-before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on-there must first be such a thing as "the right to have rights". The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of mass deportations, Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the centre of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines-including history, law, politics, and literary studies-discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today.
John Rawls is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has permanently shaped the nature and terms of moral and political philosophy, deploying a robust and specialized vocabulary that reaches beyond philosophy to political science, economics, sociology, and law. This volume is a complete and accessible guide to Rawls' vocabulary, with over 200 alphabetical encyclopaedic entries written by the world's leading Rawls scholars. From 'basic structure' to 'burdened society', from 'Sidgwick' to 'strains of commitment', and from 'Nash point' to 'natural duties', the volume covers the entirety of Rawls' central ideas and terminology, with illuminating detail and careful cross-referencing. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars of Rawls, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, ethics, political science, sociology, international relations and law.
"Symposium: The Meaning of the Civil Rights Revolution" is, in effect, a new and extensive book of contemporary thought on civil rights by many of today's leading writers on the Constitution. In February 2014, the Yale Law Journal held a symposium at Yale Law School marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the simultaneous publication of Bruce Ackerman’s We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution (2014). Contributors' essays reflected on the origins or status of the American civil rights project, using Ackerman’s book as a focal point or a foil. Those essays are collected as the June 2014 issue, the final issue of the academic year. The contents are: • We the People: Each and Every One — Randy E. Barnett • Reactionary Rhetoric and Liberal Legal Academia — Justin Driver • Popular Sovereignty and the United States Constitution: Tensions in the Ackermanian Program — Sanford Levinson • The Neo-Hamiltonian Temptation — David A. Strauss • The Civil Rights Canon: Above and Below — Tomiko Brown-Nagin • Changing the Wind: Notes Toward a Demosprudence of Law and Social Movements — Lani Guinier & Gerald Torres • Protecting Civil Rights in the Shadows — David A. Super • Universalism and Civil Rights (with Notes on Voting Rights After Shelby) — Samuel R. Bagenstos • Separate Spheres — Cary Franklin • Ackerman's Civil Rights Revolution and Modern American Racial Politics — Rogers M. Smith • Rethinking Rights After the Second Reconstruction — Richard Thompson Ford • A Revolution at War with Itself? Preserving Employment Preferences from Weber to Ricci — Sophia Z. Lee • Have We Moved Beyond the Civil Rights Revolution? — John D. Skrentny • Equal Protection in the Key of Respect — Deborah Hellman • Ackerman’s Brown — Randall L. Kennedy • The Anti-Humiliation Principle and Same-Sex Marriage — Kenji Yoshino • De-Schooling Constitutional Law — Bruce Ackerman The issue, the eighth and final one of Volume 123, also includes a cumulative Index to the entire volume's titles and authors. As with previous digital editions of Yale Law Journal available from Quid Pro Books, features include active Tables of Contents (including links in each Essay's own table), linked footnotes and URLs, and proper ebook and Bluebook formatting.
The meaning of things is a study of the significance of material possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling.