Human Rights In The Market Place

The ideology of human rights protection has gained considerable momentum during the second half of the twentieth century at both national and international level and appears to be an effective lever for bringing about legal change. This book analyzes this strategy in economic and commercial policy and considers the transportation of the 'public law' discourse of basic human rights protection into the 'commercial law' context of economic policy, business activity and corporate behaviour. The volume will prove indispensable for anyone interested in human rights, international law, and business and commercial law.

Special adoption price: $95.00/copy, 10 or more At a time of great change, turmoil, and contradiction in international human rights law and politics, authors Jeanne M. Woods and Hope Lewis have responded to the growing need for a classroom text that focuses squarely on economic, social, and cultural rights--"the neglected step-children of the human rights family"--and their intimate inter-relationship to civil and political rights. Students and instructors will find the results informative and provocative. Intended for use in law school, graduate, and undergraduate survey courses, as well as seminars on human rights, this book will be useful for teachers using both international and comparative approaches. The text is divided into four accessible parts: I. "Human Rights and the Global Marketplace: Discursive Themes" introduces the nature and scope of human rights discourse. II. "International Instruments and Their Implementation" takes students through an array of international and regional human rights treaties that address economic, social, and cultural rights. III. "Power, Politics, and Poverty: Structural Challenges to the Realization of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights" addresses major controversies in, and barriers to, the realization of socio-economic and cultural rights. IV. "Comparative Approaches" is valuable for international human rights, comparative law, and comparative constitutional law courses. Throughout the book, the authors provide notes, questions, and further reading suggestions to stimulate classroom discussion, debate, and research. The volume also includes valuable appendices, with a bibliography of relevant texts and articles and a selection of NGOs that focus on these issues. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint. Winner of the Notable Contribution in the Field of Human Rights Scholarship award at the US Human Rights Network National Conference in Chicago in April 2008

The ideology of human rights protection has gained considerable momentum during the second half of the twentieth century at both national and international level and appears to be an effective lever for bringing about legal change. This book analyzes this strategy in economic and commercial policy and considers the transportation of the 'public law' discourse of basic human rights protection into the 'commercial law' context of economic policy, business activity and corporate behaviour. The volume will prove indispensable for anyone interested in human rights, international law, and business and commercial law.

Law and Justice in China's New Marketplace provides the first comprehensive multidisciplinary analysis of the jurisprudence and related law underlying the contemporary Chinese transition to the 'socialist market economy'. New 'pluralized jurisprudence' has moved beyond Marxist class analysis to consider a new balance of values relating to economic efficiency and social justice in the marketplace, and yet the interior debates and perspectives concerning these values are virtually unknown in the Western scholarly literature. By analysing the changing Chinese approach in law to the adjustment of social interests in the context of profound economic change , Law and Justice in China's New Marketplace provides a unique reference tool. It outlines the new vocabulary of market jurisprudence and law and examines new legal thinking on rights protection with reference to widely ranging and often hot internal debate over human rights, property law and procedural or judicial justice.

The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.

Against the backdrop of globalization and mounting evidence of the corporate subversion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights paradigm, Anna Grear interrogates the complex tendencies within law that are implicated in the emergence of 'corporate humanity'. Grear presents a critical account of legal subjectivity, linking it with law's intimate relationship with liberal capitalism in order to suggest law's special receptivity to the corporate form. She argues that in the field of human rights law, particularly within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights paradigm, human embodied vulnerability should be understood as the foundation of human rights and as a key qualifying characteristic of the human rights subject. The need to redirect human rights in order to resist their colonization by powerful economic global actors could scarcely be more urgent.

Human Rights Ethics makes an important contribution to contemporary philosophical and political debates concerning the advancement of global justice and human rights. Butler's book also lays claim to a significant place in both normative ethics and human rights studies in as much as it seeks to vindicate a universalistic, rational approach to human rights ethics. Butler's innovative approach is not based on murky claims to "natural rights" that supposedly hold wherever human beings exist; nor does it succumb to the traditional problems of justification associated with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other procedural approaches to human rights studies. Instead, Butler proposes "a dialectical justification of human rights by indirect proof" that claims not to be question begging. Very much in the spirit of Hegel and Habermas, Butler proposes to vindicate a "totally rational account of human rights," but one that depends concretely and historically on a dialectically constructed "right to freedom of thought in its universal modes."