New Books in Human Rights

With Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013), Cymene Howe offers an ethnography of activism. Woven into Nicaragua’s political history of revolution and U.S. intervention, the struggle for sexual rights there takes place on three stages: in intimate settings of lesbian discussion groups, in the public sphere marked by demonstrations, press conferences and celebrations, and in visual and print media. Howe’s informants (activists, advocates, students, educators, television actors, members of Nicaragua’s queer community) illustrate the transformations and continuities in the culture of sexuality in Nicaragua. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that the government must permit any religious practice, even one that’s nominally illegal? Clearly not. You can’t shoot someone even if God tells you to. Does it mean, then, that religious liberty is a sort of fiction and that the government can actually closely circumscribe religious practice? Clearly not. The government can’t ban a putatively religious practice just because it’s expedient to do so.So where’s the line? In God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2014), Marci A. Hamilton argues that it’s shifting rapidly. Traditionally, the government, congress, and courts agreed that though Americans should enjoy extensive religious freedom, that freedom did not include license to do anything the religious might like. A sensible accommodation between church and state had to be made so that both the church and state could do their important work.According to Hamilton, in recent decades radical religious reformers have mounted a successful campaign to throw the idea of a sensible accommodation out the window. They have expanded the scope of religious liberty and thereby limited the ability of the government to protect citizens generally. In this sense, she says, religion–a force for great social good, in her mind–has been made into an instrument of harm for many Americans. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Federico Fabbrini is Assistant Professor of European & Comparative Constitutional Law at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. In his new book, entitled Fundamental Rights in Europe: Challenges and Transformations in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2014), Fabbrini analyses the constitutional implications of the highly complex European architecture for the protection of fundamental rights and the interactions between the various European human rights standards.By innovatively comparing this architecture with the United States Federal System, the book advances an analytical model that systematically explains the dynamics at play within the European multilevel human rights architecture. The book however also goes beyond simple theory and tests the model of challenges and transformations by examining four very interesting and extremely relevant case studies. In the end, a ‘neo-federal’ theory is proposed that is able to frame the dilemmas of ‘identity, equality, and supremacy’ behind this multilevel architecture in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Lewis is the author of Direct Democracy and Minority Rights: A Critical Assessment of the Tyranny of the Majority in the American States (Routledge, 2013). Lewis is an assistant professor of Political Science at Siena College.The book is primarily about the intersection of various forms direct democracy (ballot initiatives, referendum, etc.) and minority rights. Much of the existing literature has been “agnostic” on the persistent concern among political scientists about the tyranny of the majority. Lewis makes a different argument that there is both a direct and an indirect effect of direct democracy. Using Event History Analysis of several policies to restrict minority rights (prohibitions on same-sex marriage, bans on affirmative action), he finds substantial evidence that states in which voters have strong powers of direct democracy have routinely passed limits on minority rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press 2010) takes the reader on a sweeping journey through the history of international law from the ancient world to the present in search for an answer to the question: where did human rights come from? The book’s author, Columbia University intellectual historian Samuel Moyn examines, in turn, Enlightenment humanism, socialist internationalism, horror at twentieth-century genocide, anti-colonialism, and the civil rights movement. But he concludes that these were not sufficient individually or collectively to account for the emergence this key term of our contemporary political vocabulary. Human rights has, as Moyn tells us in this interview, a more recent and surprising vintage.I have never read a book that devoted so much space to where something wasn’t and to why it wasn’t there. Yet in Moyn’s explanation of the non-existence of human rights until its breakthrough moment in the 1970s, we learn a great deal not only about the importance of the nation-state to the conception of individual rights, but about the nature of historical change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many have argued in recent years that the U.S. constitutional system exalts individual rights over responsibilities, virtues, and the common good. Answering the charges against liberal theories of rights, James Fleming and Linda McClain develop and defend a civic liberalism that takes responsibilities and virtues–as well as rights–seriously. In Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (Harvard University Press, 2013), they provide an account of ordered liberty that protects basic liberties stringently, but not absolutely, and permits government to encourage responsibility and inculcate civic virtues without sacrificing personal autonomy to collective determination.The battle over same-sex marriage is one of many current controversies the authors use to defend their understanding of the relationship among rights, responsibilities, and virtues. Against accusations that same-sex marriage severs the rights of marriage from responsible sexuality, procreation, and parenthood, they argue that same-sex couples seek the same rights, responsibilities, and goods of civil marriage that opposite-sex couples pursue. Securing their right to marry respects individual autonomy while also promoting moral goods and virtues. Other issues to which they apply their idea of civic liberalism include reproductive freedom, the proper roles and regulation of civil society and the family, the education of children, and clashes between First Amendment freedoms (of association and religion) and antidiscrimination law. Articulating common ground between liberalism and its critics, Fleming and McClain develop an account of responsibilities and virtues that appreciates the value of diversity in our morally pluralistic constitutional democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shannon Gleeson is the author of Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston (Cornell University Press, 2012). Dr. Gleeson is assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. San Jose, CA and Houston, TX are two of the country’s largest gateways for immigrants, and these cases used to explain how immigration policy is implemented at the local level. Gleeson unearths the varied ways political institutions and civic actors accommodate the large number of newcomers and enact worker rights laws. While deeply rooted in theories from sociology, the book’s success in mapping the political players and local politics makes it an important read for political scientists, particularly those interested in interest groups and civil society. Gleeson also draws in the role foreign consulates increasingly play in protecting the rights of migrants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel McCool, professor of political science at the University of Utah, is the editor of The Most Fundamental Right: Contrasting Perspectives on the Voting Rights Act (Indiana University Press, 2012). The VRA was one of the center pieces of the civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s. The Act aimed to address great inequities in access to and participation in voting, particularly among African Americans. Perhaps most controversially, the law labeled a handful of states that were deemed the most egregious violators of voting rights, and required them to gain pre-clearance from the Department of Justice on any changes in state voting procedures. Nearly fifty years later, is the case for the VRA still so pressing or are modifications or a complete overhaul called for? This timely collection provides deep theoretical and empirical justifications for the VRA, and equally well-developed arguments in opposition. One finished the collection more informed and a little unsure of what is called, both signs of a well-edited volume.The timeliness of this book cannot be overstated. On Wednesday February 26, 2013, the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Voting Rights case of Shelby County v Holder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liberal democracies are in the business of protecting individuals and their rights. Central among these are the rights to free expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience. Liberal democracies are also in the business of sustaining a political environment in which citizens are regarded as political equals. In exercising their rights, some citizens will come to hold beliefs and viewpoints that are fundamentally at odds with the idea that all citizens are their equals. That is, in a free society, some citizens will come to endorse views which reject the idea of a society of free and equal citizens. Such cases seem to put the liberal democratic state in a bind. It must permit citizens to adopt and express illiberal and anti-democratic viewpoints, or else violate its commitment to the core freedoms it prizes. Yet the spread of such viewpoints, and sometimes even their very expression, can threaten the equality other citizens and undermine the stability of a democratic society. What should the state do?In his new book, When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? How Democracies can Protect Expression and Promote Equality (Princeton University Press, 2012), Corey Brettschneider proposes a view he calls “value democracy” to address this kind of quandary. He claims that although the democratic state must permit the adoption and expression of even hateful views, it nonetheless can object to and criticize them. That is, Brettschneider makes a case for thinking that the state is permitted to–and in some contexts must–employ its expressive power to combat hateful viewpoints. The book hence addresses fundamental philosophical questions concerning free speech, equality, and the authority of the democratic state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Julietta Hua analyzes how discourse on human trafficking creates the boundaries of victimhood and thereby restricts concepts of punishment, remedy, and citizenship. Analyzing legislation, public discourse, and interview materials, Dr. Hua traces how gender, nationality, and racial identities become inscribed into the concept of sex trafficking. The subject matter is heavy, but Dr. Hua presents a delightfully rigorous theoretical framework, careful interpretation of proffered data, and poignant illustrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices