Faculty Chapters

Follow

• 

  Foreword

  Bryan A. Stevenson

  Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.

• 

  Foreword

  Bryan A. Stevenson

  Surely Goodness and Mercy: A Journey into Illness and Solidarity is a narrative account of Murphy Davis’ 25-year battle with cancer. For 14 years before the cancer first struck and throughout most of her surgeries and treatment, she lived in the Open Door Community, a residential community in downtown Atlanta, founded with her husband, Ed Loring in 1981. Both Davis and Loring are ordained Presbyterian ministers and practice the discipline of seeking deeper solidarity with the poor and marginalized. As the cancer time and again threatened to bring death, Davis engaged the public health care system-first through nine years of treatment at Grady Hospital (Atlanta’s public hospital and primary health care delivery for the poor) and another 16 years at Emory’s Cancer Center on Medicaid for the Disabled. Through this lens, Murphy Davis has considered the theological and political dimensions of illness and access to care; she has grown into an ever-deeper solidarity with the homeless poor who continued to gather and persistently prayed and cared for her and her family. The men and women on Georgia’s death row, to whom Davis had been a pastor 18 years when she was first struck down was owned by her convicted companions as “one of us,” as they realized that she too was living under a sentence of death. The journey has brought reflections on Biblical theology and what it means to truly face and engage death. After 25 years, Murphy Davis is still alive and able to tell her story, thanks to the persistent care of committed doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, and family and friends (known and unknown) who have accompanied her, cared for her and prayed her through it all. She lives in deep gratitude and asserts the truth that “Goodness and Mercy have run after me all of my days.”

• 

  Introduction

  Bryan A. Stevenson

  EJI's Reconstruction in America report documents nearly 2,000 more confirmed racial terror lynchings of Black people in America than previously detailed. The report explores the 12 years following the Civil War, when lawlessness and violence perpetrated by white mobs and permitted by state, local, and federal authorities created a new era in American history of racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and Jim Crow—an era from which our nation has yet to recover.

• 

  The Lens of Gordon Parks: A Different Picture of Crime in America

  Bryan A. Stevenson

  When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color. The resulting eight-page photo-essay “The Atmosphere of Crime” was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly-hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candor. Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behavior and a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to do what it does best: record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life’s readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks’ original reportage. Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and The Museum of Modern Art

• 

  Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery

  Bryan A. Stevenson

  For decades, the American criminal justice system has followed a "tough on crime" model. That's starting to change, following increased criticism of prisons and policing. One model for reform has become especially prominent: restorative justice. Restorative justice prioritizes community-led reconciliation between victim and offender. Based on indigenous practices and motivated by inequities in our current system, restorative justice is premised on a radical redefinition of social harm. To understand this challenging topic, the articles in this book cover deep explorations of our current system, examples of restorative justice in practice, and an overview of the institutional barriers to change. Media literacy terms and questions are included, inviting readers to carefully consider how reporting of the topic has developed over time.

• 

  Dissenting

  Jeremy Waldron

  I welcome the outcome of today’s decision as a significant improvement in our institution of marriage. Certainly it is a momentous change in that institution, and many people will rejoice at the new opportunities it opens up for them. However, because I do not think it is the proper role of the federal judiciary to effect such a change, I must respectfully dissent from what has been decided here today.

• 

  Reflections on “Supreme Emergency"

  Jeremy Waldron

  Toward the end of Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer introduces the idea of “supreme emergency” and considers whether it might be permissible for a society desperate to avoid military defeat when the stakes are very, very high, to resort to methods of waging a war that are ordinarily forbidden. The bombing of civilian areas of German cities in the early 1940s by the British air force is sometimes cited as an example. In this chapter, I consider how best to interpret Walzer’s thinking on this subject. I consider various ways of thinking about “supreme emergency,” including the possible neutral application of the idea (so that it might be used by our enemies for example) and the question of whether the relevant stakes consist of the extinction of a society or of a whole civilization. I argue that Walzer is best understood not as proposing a modification to the laws of war. Instead he is thinking aloud—and thinking responsibly—about what happens, and about what ought to happen, when the stakes have become so high that there is a failure in the circumstances that make the ordinary restraints on fighting a war viable.

• 

  Rights and Human Rights

  Jeremy Waldron

  What makes a right a human right? If we were to start in the realm of positive law, we might define human rights more or less by ostension. They are rights listed in certain multilateral treaties and conventions in inter- national law, like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural What makes a right a human right? If we were to start in the realm of positive law, we might define human rights more or less by ostension. They are rights listed in certain multilateral treaties and conventions in international law, like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). There is nothing wrong with definition by ostension; no other mode of definition is available for certain terms like simple colour words. But ‘human rights’ is a complex phrase and we should expect an account of its complexity to tell us how the terms it contains—‘human’ and ‘rights’—work together to constitute its meaning.

• 

  Rule-of-Law Rights and Populist Impatience

  Jeremy Waldron

  Human rights are a mixed bag, and populist antipathy towards human rights is not spread evenly across its contents. The idea of a human right as such is too abstract to be sustained as an object of political suspicion. Usually it is some subset of human rights or some particular aspect of human rights practice that excites critical attention from populist politicians and the citizens who support them. The subset of rights that I want to concentrate on I will call “Rule-of-Law rights.” By that I mean the cluster of rights in each of the main human rights instruments that protect Rule-of-Law values, particularly procedural values. In the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), these are the rights referred to in Articles 9 and 14–16. They prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, they require persons arrested to be informed of the charges against them and brought quickly before a judicial officer, they empower detained persons to challenge their detention, they entitle those charged with criminal offenses to trial within a reasonable time, with detailed procedural guarantees such as the presumption of innocence, a right to the assistance of counsel, a right to compel and examine witnesses, a right to appellate opportunities, and the benefit of protection against double jeopardy. They also comprise rules against retrospective laws, and rules governing pre-trial custody and release. There is a similar list of Rule-of-Law rights in Articles 5–7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). National constitutions and Bills of Rights include these measures too: the UK Human Rights Act, obviously (because it is a domestication of the ECHR), and—from a much earlier era—the various due process (or procedural due-process) guarantees of the Constitution of the United States (such as the Fifth and Sixth Amendments). I call these “Rule-of-Law rights” (“ROL rights,” for short) to indicate that their function is to convey, in rights-form, the burden of certain principles of the political ideal we call “the Rule of Law.” This characterization calls for a brief digression. Among those who are interested in the Rule of Law there is a debate about whether that ideal should be understood to comprise substantive commitments to human rights or whether it should be treated as a “thin” formal/procedural ideal. It should be noted that the existence of human rights like those just mentioned does not affect this dispute. Rights such as Articles 5–7 of the ECHR and articles 9–10 and 14–16 of the ICCPR are not what defenders of a “thick” conception of the Rule of Law have in mind. They think it comprises rights like free speech, freedom of religion, and other civil liberties. It is true that “thin” conceptions of the Rule of Law haven’t given as much attention to procedural principles as they ought to have: following Lon Fuller, they have focused more on formal principles, like generality, clarity, prospectivity, publicity, stability, and so on.2 But the procedural principles mentioned in the second paragraph of this chapter are usually taken to be part of a “thin” conception of the Rule of Law. One other point: that some human rights provisions convey the importance of certain Rule-of-Law requirements doesn’t mean that human rights documents embody the full panoply of Rule-of-Law ideas (even on a “thin” conception). Of the formal principles just mentioned, only the principle of prospectivity figures explicitly in the human rights materials;3 human rights documents do not enact other aspects of Lon Fuller’s inner morality of law,4 though aspects of Fuller’s conception have figured in doctrine concerning what counts as “prescribed by law” or “provided by law” for the purposes of the exception provisos for freedom of thought, conscience and religion, free speech, and freedom of association. Though human rights present themselves as a simple list, no subset of rights can be considered in isolation, particularly so far as the attitudes they elicit in the community are concerned. As we shall see, populist (and, actually, even elite) reactions to the rights I have identified are affected by some other principles that govern their operation. Some of these are rights in their own right, like the ECHR’s Article 8 (the right to protection of family life). Others are interpretations of rights or doctrines that have grown up around ROL rights, such as principles restricting whole-life sentences and forbidding the disenfranchisement of prisoners. In what follows, we will consider the possibility that the entanglement of these principles with ROL rights has undermined respect for the latter, so that disentanglement might be seen as a way of offsetting populist resentment.

• 

  COVID, Europe, and the Self-Asphyxiation of Democracy

  Joseph H. H. Weiler

  I have no crystal ball with which to assess or predict the long-term impact of COVID on our democracies; long experience has taught me to avoid punditry—I always get it wrong. But the current circumstance has been helpful in highlighting and accentuating longstanding problems of democracy in and of Europe (Member States and the EU itself) which predate the pandemic and are likely to outlive it. And though the focus of this chapter is on Europe, the underlying issues are, I believe, relevant far more widely.

• 

  Epilogue

  Joseph H. H. Weiler

  This teaching of Jesus seems so compelling, the question of why Jews persist in observing the rules of kosher eating is more than a curiosity. It explains more than anything else the deep-rooted Christian sense of religious superiority (and barely concealed contempt) vis-à-vis Judaism, which is considered as obsessed with meaningless and primitive rituals compared to Christianity concerned with ethics and the heart. At a deeper level it defines the ontological difference between Christianity and Judaism. So why do Jews observe Kosher?

• 

  Not on Bread Alone Doth Man Liveth (Deut. 8:3; Mat 4:4): Religion, Human Rights and the Circumstance of Europe

  Joseph H. H. Weiler

  Polarization in today’s politics, pre- and post COVID, transcends nations, states regions and continents. It’s a feature of politics which, in and on itself, when played to extremes by demonizing one’s opponents, it threatens democracy itself—since it frays the demos some cohesion of which is necessary for the legitimacy of majoritarianism, one of the pillars of national democracies. Its lexical manifestation is to be found with expressions such as ‘traitors’ or ‘not real’ Americans, Italians, Israelis—take your pick and fill in the gap. It has, lamentably in my view, a spillover effect also into the academic world of scholarship. A word of criticism of, say, the European Court of Justice instantly brands you a ‘Eurosceptic’ and one of ‘them’. To speak of Universal Values, casts you as an enemy of this or that national cause. This is not to say, not at all, that one cannot bring to one’s scholarship a fully engaged normative and ethical commitment, especially in the field of law which has, or should have, at its roots a commitment to justice. But it militates against careful listening, complex reasoning and understanding and more fine grained normative judgments. Justice is oftentimes not black and white. It is particularly so when it comes to dealing with the phenomenon of Populism which has moved from the fringe to the center of politics. Trying to understand Populism is not akin to justifying it.

• 

  Property as Intangible Property

  Katrina M. Wyman

  Historically, property theory has focused on real property as the premier example of property, reflecting the longstanding importance of land as a source of wealth and political power. This essay argues that it is time for property theorists to pay more attention to intangible property. It makes three main points. First, it emphasizes the contemporary economic importance of intangible property, as well as its increasing social importance in everyday life, especially in highly urbanized, developed countries. Second, it posits that the currently prevalent thing-based understanding of property is sufficiently capacious to embrace intangible property. Third, it speculates about why property theory has remained largely focused on tangible forms of property. It concludes by underscoring potential benefits of property theory paying greater attention to intangible property: an expanded focus on intangible property might lead to greater recognition of the constrained character of property in the modern urbanized world, and greater acknowledgment of the potential for property—albeit likely in a constrained form—to play a role in addressing the consequences of modern technology.

• 

  Article 32: The Right to Protection Against Economic Exploitation

  Philip G. Alston

  1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. 2. States Parties shall take legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to ensure the implementation of the present article. To this end, and having regard to the relevant provisions of other international instruments, States Parties shall in particular: (a) Provide for a minimum age or minimum ages for admission to employment; (b) Provide for appropriate regulation of the hours and conditions of employment; (c) Provide for appropriate penalties or other sanctions to ensure the effective enforcement of the present article.

• 

  Taxation, Human Rights, and a Universal Basic Income

  Philip G. Alston

  This concluding chapter explores the arguments for and against a universal basic income (UBI) in light of the provisions of international human rights law. To appreciate the significance of a UBI, at least in its comprehensive and ideal form, it is important to note that it is explicitly designed to challenge most of the key assumptions underpinning traditional social security systems. The most committed proponents of UBI proclaim their approach to be utopian, not in the sense of being unrealistic or unachievable, but as providing a highly ambitious, sweeping, and progressive vision. Meanwhile, critics or skeptics who raise objections based on unaffordability, the unacceptability of unconditionality, or the unrealistic change in mentality required will often be dismissed as unimaginative defenders of an obviously unsatisfactory status quo.

• 

  The Impact of Austerity on the Protection of Human Rights

  Philip G. Alston

  When should international human rights bodies decide to consider allegations that a government’s adoption of particular economic austerity measures constitutes a violation of its human rights obligations? What degree of causal link would need to be established, and when should traditional forms of deference to governmental choices in the economic and social sphere give way to a heightened form of scrutiny? Given the increasing prominence of austerity, or ‘fiscal consolidation’ as agencies such as the International Monetary Fund now prefer to call it, this issue will demand more careful consideration in the years ahead. As various of the precepts of neoliberal economics have become more accepted, austerity has become a central part of the economic and social landscape in a wide range of situations in countries all around the world. The topic seems particularly apposite for a festschrift in honour of Allan Rosas, given that it combines two of the key areas in which he has excelled, in the course of a highly distinguished career. Long before his formal entrance on to the European Union stage, Allan was a leading scholar, not only in Finland but also internationally, in both human rights law and international humanitarian law. In the former field he was also one of the relatively small group of proponents of the central importance of economic, social and cultural rights, which are generally assumed to be the rights that are most directly affected by policies of austerity. After he joined the European Commission Legal Service as Principal Legal Adviser and then Deputy Director-General, and subsequently became a judge at the Court of Justice of the European Union, he devoted much of his analytical energies to adjudicating cases challenging aspects of economic policies adopted by or within the EU, some of which inevitably involved the intersection of fundamental rights and respect for the EU’s fiscal policy constraints. The analysis that follows begins with an attempt to define what we mean by austerity. It then provides a detailed, and in some respects first-hand, review of the austerity-driven policies that have been pursued in the United Kingdom in recent years, and of some of the results that have followed. Scholarly analyses of issues related to international human rights law are often preoccupied with finer jurisprudential considerations of case law and of the various other pronouncements that emanate from non-judicial bodies that play an important role in monitoring state conduct. While those are certainly relevant for present purposes, it seems important to have a reasonably comprehensive understanding of the policies adopted in the UK in order to provide the necessary backdrop for a consideration of how international human rights bodies should respond to austerity, especially in situations that do not involve the imposition of such an approach by external actors. Following the details of the UK case, the chapter then considers the approach to austerity that has been taken by the Council of Europe and its various constituent parts before comparing this to the approach taken by United Nations human rights bodies, including those monitoring compliance with treaty obligations and those established under the so-called Special Procedures system. It concludes by asking whether these approaches are adequate for responding to the nature and scale of the challenges posed by austerity.

• 

  The World Bank as a Human Rights-Free Zone

  Philip G. Alston

  This chapter addresses the question of whether the World Bank should engage with issues relating to human rights and, if so, why and how. Although such questions have long been matters of public controversy, they have never been satisfactorily resolved. In addition to the fact that there are strong reasons to revisit them now, they also carry a special resonance in looking back at the many contributions that Louise Arbour has made to the human rights cause in the course of her multifaceted and extraordinarily distinguished career. Whether as judge, chief prosecutor, High Commissioner or think-tank president, she distinguished herself by always thinking creatively and challenging established dogmas. She combined compelling logic and analytical skills with intellectual and political courage, along with a marvelous dry sense of humor. Of particular relevance to the topic I have selected for this chapter is the fact that, as United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, she was a tireless promoter of the need to integrate human rights considerations into mainstream activities in fields such as development, security and transitional justice. THE WORLD BANK'S KEY ROLE No international development agency is more important than the World Bank in terms of its influence on overall development thinking, its shaping of policies to overcome poverty, and its ability to encourage or discourage governments and other key development actors to incorporate human rights considerations into their policies and programs. Some might question this characterization on the grounds that the $61 billion that the Bank provided in loans, grants, equity investments and guarantees to governments and businesses in the fiscal year 2016 represents only a fraction of the total private capital flows to developing countries from all multilateral and national development banks, bilateral donors and private investors. However, in addition to the funding dimension, its research is more voluminous and influential than that of its peers, it remains the key standard-setter in many areas, its knowledge and expertise are often crucial, and its seal of approval frequently encourages the participation of other donors or investors.

• 

  Universal Basic Income as a Social Rights-Based Antidote to Growing Economic Insecurity

  Philip G. Alston

  One important response to increasing economic insecurity and rights retrenchment is the emerging policy proposal for a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This chapter examines the heritage of this idea in distributive justice debates, and its current uptake in small-scale experiments in India, Finland and Kenya. The UBI may address growing economic insecurity and precariousness, and new challenges brought by global supply chains and automation. Alston, who engaged this proposal in a recent report as Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, has long called for engagement, by the human rights movement, with questions of political economy. Here, he contrasts the UBI with a series of other schemes of social protection, including the negative income tax, global basic income, welfare state, cash transfers (both conditional and unconditional) and social protection floors. In particular, he suggests that all schemes be brought more critically in dialogue, and be enlivened to implications, not only for rights to an adequate standard of living, social security and work but also to the overall social protection framework, in both developed and developing states.

• 

  Article 21: Adoption

  Philip G. Alston, Nigel Cantwell, and John Tobin

  States Parties that recognize and/or permit the system of adoption shall ensure that the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration and they shall: a) Ensure that the adoption of a child is authorized only by competent authorities who determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures and on the basis of all pertinent and reliable information, that the adoption is permissible in view of the child’s status concerning parents, relatives and legal guardians and that, if required, the persons concerned have given their informed consent to the adoption on the basis of such counselling as may be necessary; b) Recognize that inter-country adoption may be considered as an alternative means of child’s care, if the child cannot be placed in a foster or an adoptive family or cannot in any suitable manner be cared for in the child’s country of origin; c) Ensure that the child concerned by inter-country adoption enjoys safeguards and standards equivalent to those existing in the case of national adoption; d) Take all appropriate measures to ensure that, in inter-country adoption, the placement does not result in improper financial gain for those involved in it; e) Promote, where appropriate, the objectives of the present article by concluding bilateral or multilateral arrangements or agreements, and endeavour, within this framework, to ensure that the placement of the child in another country is carried out by competent authorities or organs.

• 

  The ILO’s Centenary Declaration and Social Justice in the Digital Age

  Philip G. Alston and Jackson Gandour

  This chapter examines some of the Declaration’s key policy prescriptions in light of the approach taken by the Global Commission. In order to highlight the significance of some of the key policy choices, the chapter contrasts the ILO’s approach with that of the World Bank. The Bank, for example, advocates for less progressive taxation and weakened job security protections, while the Global Commission takes the opposite tack. Unsurprisingly, the ILO has long resisted many of the Bank’s proposals for deregulatory economic policies which are seen as cutting against ‘the ILO’s raison d’être’, but this makes the contrast all the more instructive for those seeking to locate the Declaration in terms of its policy significance and trying to evaluate its underlying assumptions.

• 

  Introduction: Fiscal Policy as Human Rights Policy

  Philip G. Alston and Nikki Reisch

  This introductory chapter illustrates some of the linkages between tax and human rights. Taxation affects which resources stay in private versus public hands, which activities are encouraged or discouraged, how much is available to the state, and who pays for and receives the public goods and services the state provides. Human rights, in turn, inform not only how tax policy should be made, but what policies are permissible, when, and why, setting parameters for the revenue-raising objectives and distributive effects of taxation, as well as the processes by which tax laws are adopted and implemented. In short, tax affects the realization of human rights in all countries—developed and developing alike—through its role in resource mobilization, redistribution, regulation, and representation. The chapter provides an overview of the volume’s contents and discusses how the policy of fiscal consolidation underpins many of the phenomena examined in those contributions. It then identifies some of the key ways in which human rights norms should feature in future debates over fiscal policy.

• 

  Frameworks for Understanding the ILO

  José E. Alvarez

  The organizers of this centennial conference suggested that I consider how jurisprudential approaches common among international law scholars apply to the ILO. The request calls to mind the Indian parable about blind men who are asked to define an elephant but are allowed to touch only part of the animal. Predictably, each of them comes up with seriously misleading descriptions based on their impressions of its tail, ears, skin, trunk, and so on. Perhaps, in line with the moral of this story, ILO insiders recognize that they may be too close to the ILO’s discrete parts and need the distance provided by external perspectives to better understand their complex employer. Alternatively, maybe they fear that their professional stake in the Organization’s success makes them less then dispassionate about the Organization’s past and less than ideal prognosticators of its future. Or maybe they think that this ‘academic’ exercise will suggest how this particular ‘elephant’ fits into its broader species, namely other international organizations (IOs). Whatever the reason, we need to acknowledge at the outset some practical hazards. International legal frameworks have their own blind spots. Scholars associated with each may attempt, like blind men, to extrapolate too much from their limited expertize or data. As Jan Klabbers has noted, many schools of thought—especially those having a U.S. academic pedigree—extend the insights of political scientists (who famously know little about law) into the legal domain (where arguably they threaten to undermine precisely what makes lawyers valuable to policy makers). Other frameworks, such as law and economics, have been subjected to their own powerful critiques—namely that its core concepts (such as efficiency, free markets, competition, rational actors, costs and benefits, the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner’s dilemma, the presence of transaction costs) are interpretative screens that filter out legal values in favour of the economists’ trade. Scholarly frames pose risks of distortion. Each may provide a partial view, no more accurate than a car’s rearview mirror where ‘objects may be closer than they appear’. There is, moreover, the risk that surveying competing frames ends up producing a toolkit from which observers can choose, pragmatically, their preferred ‘truth’, even if it happens to validate pre‑conceived normative (and political) judgments. Despite these concerns, surveys of select international law frameworks—functionalism (and its close cousin, legal positivism), realism, liberal theory, law and economics, constructivism and other ‘deliberative’ approaches, constitutionalism, and critical theories—have been undertaken and applied to the world of international organizations, even if not, as such, to the ILO. This essay rectifies that gap.

• 

  International Organizations and Global Justice

  José E. Alvarez

  José Alvarez reflects on the state of international law and international organizations at the beginning of the 21st Century and the extent to which they are taking seriously the demands of justice. In this regard, Alvarez is of the view that both international law and international organizations are very much in need of reform. If only because of this, the redistribution of power at the international level, with the emergence of new powers, makes it necessary to adapt international law and the international order to the new conditions of the time. In the process, it is not only the relevance of international law that will be preserved but also its ability to satisfy the contemporary demands of justice.

• 

  Property Rights as Human Rights

  José E. Alvarez

  While progressives in the West like to imagine an idyllic world without property, international lawyers like to imagine a world grounded in respect for human rights. Neither sees property protections as part of their ideal. This is so even though (1) every society in recorded history has seen fit to establish mechanisms for protecting property for private, common or communal use; (2) rights to property are now embraced by some 95 percent of national legal systems (most commonly in their constitutions); and (3) property protections feature in a large number of international legal regimes, including at least 20 human rights instruments. International human rights law, at least in the form of treaties, protects forms of private, common and communal property. This chapter explores what the human right of property is and is not.

• 

  Becoming Ghana

  Kwame Anthony Appiah

  Accompanying Ghana’s first national pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia, this richly illustrated catalogue presents the work of six groundbreaking artists from Ghana and its Diasporas. Ghana Freedom examines the legacies and trajectories of that freedom from independence to the present through the art of Felicia Abban, John Akomfrah, El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, Selasi Awusi Sosu, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose unique practices are explored in short commissioned texts by a new generation of Ghanaian art critics. Essays by distinguished authors Kwame Anthony Appiah, Taiye Selasi and exhibition curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim, reflect on the themes of Ghana Freedom; and a conversation between exhibition architect Sir David Adjaye and advisor Okwui Enwezor discusses Adjaye’s acclaimed work. Artist biographies and a bibliography supplement this landmark publication. Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Ghana Freedom at the Ghana Pavilion, 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (11 May – 24 November 2019).