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Bringing Human Rights Home [Three Volumes]
Cynthia Soohoo, Catherine Albisa, Martha F. Davis, ed.
ISBN: 0-275-98821-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98821-0
920 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 12/30/2007
List Price: $275.00 (UK Sterling Price: £189.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Awards:
  • 2008 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award
Description: This three-volume set chronicles the history of human rights in the United States from the perspective of domestic social justice activism. First, the set examines the political forces and historic events that resulted in the U.S.'s failure to embrace human rights principles at home while actively (albeit selectively) championing and promoting human rights abroad. It then considers the current explosion of human rights activism around issues within the United States and the way human rights is transforming domestic social justice work.

The first volume provides a historical perspective on the United States' ambivalent relationship with the international human rights movement. It examines the implications of recognizing domestic rights violations as a matter of international concern and the relationship between international and domestic law. It also addresses the role the Cold War and Southern opposition to international scrutiny of its Jim Crow policies and segregation played in shaping U.S. attitudes toward human rights generally and social and economic rights in particular. These factors forced social justice organizations to largely abandon employing a human rights framework in their domestic work and had a lasting impact on U.S. perspectives about fundamental rights and the role of government. The set also chronicles current domestic human rights work. Volumes two and three consider why domestic activists currently are using human rights and the tactical advantages and practical challenges posed by such strategies. These volumes cover everything from globalization to terrorism and the erosion of civil rights protections that led to a renewed interest in human rights; human rights versus civil rights strategies; and the different ways human rights can support social activism.
About the Author: Cynthia Soohoo is Director of the Bringing Human Rights Home Project at the Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School and is a supervising attorney for the law school's Human Rights Clinic. BHRH encourages U.S. compliance with international human rights law, including through the use of international and regional human rights mechanisms and the development of strategies to use human rights and comparative foreign law in U.S. courts. Ms. Soohoo has worked on U.S. human rights issues before U.N. human rights bodies, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights and in domestic courts on issues including juvenile justice and challenges to the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies post-9/ll. Prior to coming to HRI, she practiced law at the firm Covington & Burling for six years and was co-counsel in the landmark Alien Tort Statute case Doe v. Karadzic. Ms. Soohoo is on the Board of Directors for the U.S. Human Rights Network.

Catherine Albisa is Executive Director of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) and a consitutional and human rights lawyer with a background on the right to health. Ms. Albisa also has significant experience working in partnership with community organizers in the use of human rights standards to strengthen advocacy in the United States. Ms. Albisa co-founded NESRI along with Sharda Sekaran and Liz Sullivan in order to build legitimacy for human rights in general, and economic and social rights in particular, in the United States. She is committed to a community centered and participatory human rights approach that is locally anchored but universal and global in its vision.

Martha F. Davis is Professor of Law at Northeastern University Law School, and Co-Director of its Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy. Her scholarly writing and legal work focus on human rights, poverty and women's rights, and she lectures widely on these issues. Her book, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960-1973, received the Reginald Heber Smith Award for distinguished scholarship in the area of equal access to justice and a citation in the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel competition.
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