“The second seminar in our series was held at Warwick University on March 22nd. The seminar focused on strategic deployments of private law and civil litigation in vindicating human rights. Seminar discussions addressed and developed a number of important questions drawn, in particular, from our engagement with examples from current practice in human rights law. The core difficulty with squaring private litigation and human rights seems to be that ‘we find ourselves standing on another’s ground’, reliant on historical accretions of contingent precedent that, by and large, have nothing immediately to do with the sorts of claims discussion in this seminar – claims about sexual abuse, torture, state killing, corporate killing and so on. To what extent can we expect civil litigation to support credible struggle with the awesome definitional and political power of law? …” (more)
[Mairead Enright, The Public Life of Private Law, 9 May]
First posted 2013-05-09 19:13:19
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