Author Archives: Daniel Brinks

About Daniel Brinks

Daniel Brinks is Professor of Government and of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Until September 2019, he served as co-director of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. Dan's research focuses on the role of the law and courts in supporting and deepening democracy and human rights, with a primary regional interest in Latin America. His most recent book, with Abby Blass, is on the politics of constitutional and judicial design. Other books address the experience with uneven democracies in Latin America, the judicial response to police violence, and the enforcement of social and economic rights in the developing world. He has published articles in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and the Texas Law Review, among other journals.

Introduction: Human Rights and Economic Inequality

Abstract: The introduction situates this dossier on “Human Rights and Inequality” within broader scholarly and policy debates about the relationship between human rights and economic inequality, specifically about the extent to which human rights do, can, or should attend to economic inequality. It draws out the key arguments of each of the contributions and puts them in conversation with one another by describing the different strands and traditions of human rights scholarship and practice with which the various authors engage. Along the way, the introduction Continue reading → Continue reading →

Human Rights and the Political Economy

This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is refreshing to read a critique of human rights that is neither overly deterministic nor overly grounded in the experience and concerns of the Northwest quadrant of the globe. Amy Kapczynksi’s call for an approach to human rights that attacks the political economy of a problem is an excellent contribution to the current debate about Continue reading →