Humanity Journal

Congrats to Miriam Ticktin, Humanity editorial collective member, who has been selected for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Social Sciences.

Joseph Slaughter, one of the members of Humanity‘s editorial collective, published “We’re in the Middle of a Corporate Civil Rights Movement” on Talking Points Memo. Check it out. Among other things, Slaughter notes that while people “often talk of the women’s liberation and gay rights movements as building on the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement,” corporations “may be the biggest beneficiaries of abolition and the civil rights struggle—as the successful pushback against the Indiana RFRA will ultimately prove.” As Slaughter points out, this has a history, Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal runs my brief review of Jens Ohlin’s book contending that there is.

Congrats to David Singh Grewal (Yale) and Jedediah Purdy (Duke) who have curated and introduced a major new dossier in Law and Contemporary Problems on law and neoliberalism. The table of contents with links to full-text articles is here.

This post is the final response in our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay from our most recent issue. Be sure to read the entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and Bart De Sutter. I would like to thank Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and Bart de Sutter for their thoughtful comments. De Sutter is right to point to the limited availability of the internal documentation of Human Rights Watch (HRW). Much remains to be discovered, and I look forward to learning more about the history of the Helsinki Continue reading →

This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and a final response from the author. Peter Slezkine’s contribution is a welcome attempt to understand the expanding scope of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from its origins as the Helsinki Watch to its current claim to defend the rights of people worldwide. Despite the recent surge of interest in the history Continue reading →

This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Bart De Sutter, and a final response from the author. Peter Slezkine does a good job describing the origins Human Rights Watch. I could quibble over a few details and points of emphasis.  In general, however, so far as it goes, his account seems to me to be accurate. In the comment that follows, Continue reading →

This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Stephen Hopgood, Aryeh Neier, Bart De Sutter, and a final response from the author. Peter Slezkine is right to note there were two different methodologies at the origin of Human Rights Watch, which began as a series of regional Watch groups. Helsinki Watch was founded foremost to protect local activists in Soviet-era Moscow, Warsaw, Prague and other Eastern Continue reading →

This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, Bart De Sutter, and the final response from the author. Peter Slezkine’s “From Helsinki to Human Rights Watch” tilts persuasively at a key myth beloved by human right advocates, that of the ineluctable unfolding of natural law (being “in league with the cosmos,” Thomas Jefferson called it). Actually how Human Rights Watch evolved was Continue reading →

Deadline for abstract submission: February 15, 2015 The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (IHEID), International Law Department, is convening a conference entitled ‘International Law and Time’ from June 12–13, 2015, to explore the phenomena of time and change in international law. Time is an inherent component of many of the most important international law concepts. However, it also fundamentally determines international law as a field. International law has been inconstant dynamic change since its inception. Capturing and understanding this change in time is Continue reading →