The Politics of the Globalization of Law

How does the globalization of law, the emergence of multiple and shifting venues of legal accountability, enhance or evade the fulfillment of international human rights? Alison Brysk’s edited volume aims to assess the institutional and political factors that determine the influence of the globalization of law on the realization of human rights.

The globalization of law has the potential to move the international human rights regime from the generation of norms to the fulfillment of rights, through direct enforcement, reshaping state policy, granting access to civil society, and global governance of transnational forces. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars explores the development of new norms, mechanisms, and practices of international legal accountability for human rights abuse, and tests their power in a series of "hard cases." The studies find that new norms and mechanisms have been surprisingly effective globally, in terms of treaty adherence, international courts, regime change, and even the diffusion of citizenship rights, but this effect is conditioned by regional and domestic structures of influence and access. However, law has a more mixed impact on abuses in Mexico, Israel-Palestine and India. Brysk concludes that the globalization of law is transforming sovereignty and fostering the shift from norms to fulfillment, but that peripheral states and domains often remain beyond the reach of this transformation.

Theoretically framed, but comprised of empirical case material, this edited volume will be useful for both graduate students and academics in law, political science, human rights, international relations, global and international studies, and law and society.

Alison Brysk holds the Mellichamp Chair in Global Governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author or editor of eight previous books on human rights, including Globalization and Human Rights, Human Rights and Private Wrongs, People Out of Place, and From Human Trafficking to Human Rights. She has held visiting posts in Argentina, Canada, Ecuador, France, India, Spain, and Sweden, among others.