Human Rights, Democracy, and Legitimacy in a World of Disorder

Human Rights, Democracy, and Legitimacy in a World of Disorder brings together respected scholars from diverse disciplines to examine a trio of key concepts that help to stabilize states and the international order. While used pervasively by philosophers, legal scholars, and politicians, the precise content of these concepts is disputed, and they face new challenges in the conditions of disorder brought by the twenty-first century. This volume will explore the interrelationships and possible tensions between human rights, democracy, and legitimacy, from the philosophical, legal, and political perspectives; as well as the role of these concepts in addressing particular problems such as economic inequality, catastrophic risks posed by new technologies, access to health care, regional governance, and responses to mass migration. Comprising essays arising from an interdisciplinary symposium convened at Harvard Law School in 2016, this volume will examine how these trusted concepts may bring order to the global community.

Silja Voeneky is Professor of Public International Law, Comparative Law, and Ethics of Law at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She was a Fellow at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts and will be a Fellow at the 2018–19 FRIAS Research Group on Ethics and AI. Her areas of focus include security law, humanitarian law, international environmental law, human rights law, the interdependence of ethics and law and questions on legitimacy, democracy, and biomedicine. She previously served as Director of the Max Planck Research Group 'Democratic Legitimacy of Ethical Decisions' and was a member of the German Ethics Council from 2012–16 appointed by the Federal Government.

Gerald L. Neuman is the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School, and Co-Director of its Human Rights Program. He teaches human rights, constitutional law, and immigration and nationality law. He is the author of Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law (1996), co-author of the casebook Human Rights (2009), and co-editor of Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of the American Empire (2015). He served as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee from 2011 to 2014.