Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law : A Critical Legal Argument

This book argues how human dignity flows from an individual's capacity for self-authorship as defined by the set of expressive capabilities s/he possesses, demonstrating how such a conception of dignity can enrich international human rights law by making the amplification of human dignity its fundamental orientation.

Human dignity is not just gloss. Rather, its protection and amplification should be understood as the overall end to which international human rights law aims. This book provides both a descriptive account of how human dignity and international human rights law have been linked in the past, as well as sustained theoretical and practical arguments on how to make the link even tighter and more valuable. It successfully demonstrates the value of understanding human dignity as the end to which international human rights law strives through a number of prominent case studies and institutional analyses. Most innovatively, it links these themes to the critical legal studies tradition. Critical legal studies has long been known to eschew constructive moral arguments in favour of critique. This book argues that it is that in an age of post-modern conservatives such as Donald Trump and Victor Orban, internationalists and progressives need to provide more comprehensive and inspiring projects.