'Competing Claims: Human Rights and Climate Harms', in Stephen Humphreys (ed.),
Human Rights and Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (see
Books above)
'Conceiving Justice: Articulating Common Causes in Distinct Regimes', in Stephen
Humphreys (ed.), Human Rights and Climate Change, Cambridge University
Press, 2009 (see Books above)
'Polymorphous Sovereignty' in Charles Barbour and George Pavlich (eds.) After
Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings, Routledge [FORTHCOMING
2009]
After
Sovereignty addresses the vexed question of sovereignty in contemporary
social, political, and legal theory. The emergence, and now apparent implosion,
of international capital exceeding the borders of known political entities, the
continued expansion of a potentially endless 'war on terror', the often
predicted, but still uncertain, establishment of either a new international
American Empire or a new era of International Law, the proliferation of social
and political struggles among stateless refugees, migrant workers, and partial
citizens, the resurgence of religion as a dominant source of political
identification among people all over the globe - these developments and others
have thrown into crisis the modern concept of sovereignty, and the notions of
statehood and citizenship that rest upon it.
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'The Emptiness of Empire and Other Hazards of Theory', 57 International and
Comparative Law Quarterly 225 (2008)
'Are Social Rights Compatible with the Rule of Law? A Realist Inquiry',
Hauser Global Law Working Paper 10/06 (2007).
The motivating puzzle is: why do the many programs promoting
the rule of law abroad so rarely address social and economic rights? The
approach is to critically examine a view that has been historically central to
the reception of the rule of law as a term of art and has critically shaped its
contemporary usage--according to which social rights are incompatible with the
rule of law. The paper revisits the early twentieth century American legal
realists, whose critiques largely set the terms that came to dominate notions of
the rule of law. The paper traces some later debates that recycled the realist
themes and polarized their terms, and concludes that an insistence on the rule
of law is only rhetorically, rather than substantively, hostile to social
rights. Nevertheless, the fact that social rights fall outside the ordinary
penumbra of a rule of law vocabulary exerts a powerful presumptive force over
the interventions carried out in its name.
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'Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception', 17
European Journal of International Law 677 (2006)
This review essay examines in some detail Giorgio Agamben's
recent State of Exception, his third in a series of books that reconstruct
sovereignty using a range of interdisciplinary and critical tools. Engaging with
Agamben's text on its own terms - rather than focusing on the potential
deficiencies of an approach that eschews standard doctrinal and empirical
research - the essay seeks to distil a set of conceptual and analogical
perspectives that might help interpret the significance of the present rise of
emergency regimes. The essay concludes by exploring whether Agamben's work might
enrich legal inquiry, despite its often alien tenor, by reviewing some recent
cases in the UK and the US involving exceptional measures.
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'Nomarchy: On the Rule of Law and Authority in Giorgio Agamben and Aristotle',
19 Cambridge Review of International Affairs 331 (2006)
This article suggests that the current rise of the rule of law
as a mobilising political principle may be understood as a response to
contemporary anxiety about authority. It also argues that the recent increase in
states of emergency is complemented by an expansive legalism. First, the paper
reviews Giorgio Agamben's description of legal expansion through states of
emergency (or 'exception') dictated by a language of fear. Second, in a
philological inquiry, it accompanies the 'founding father' of the rule of law,
Aristotle, in his discussion of law's sovereignty. The core question posed by
Aristotle- regarding the inquiry into the ideal relationship between law and its
administration-remains unresolved in his Politics. Finally, the analysis is
grounded in judicial responses to states of emergency. In recent case law, the
courts both facilitate the production of emergency regimes and provide a locus
for contestation of their parameters.
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Reports / discussion
papers
International Council on Human Rights Policy, Climate Change and Human Rights: A Rough Guide (ICHRP,
2008)
Open Society Justice Initiative, Legal Remedies for the Resource Curse (OSI, 2005).
Open Society Institute, Monitoring
EU Accession: Minority Rights (OSI, 2001).
Open Society Institute, Racism in
Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (OSI, 2000).
Stephen Humphreys
