Theatre of the Rule of Law: Transnational Legal Intervention in Theory and Practice (Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law No.73; 2010; paperback edition published 2012)
Theatre of the Rule of Law presents the first sustained critique of rule of law promotion – the push to shape laws and institutions that pervades international development and post-conflict reconstruction policy today. While successful in disseminating a policy everywhere privileging the private over the public, this expansive global enterprise has largely failed in its stated goals of alleviating poverty and fortifying ‘fragile states’. Moreover, in its execution, the field deviates sharply from ‘rule of law’ principles as commonly conceived. To explain this, Stephen Humphreys examines the history of the rule of law as a term of art and a spectrum of today’s interventions, as well as earlier examples of legal export to other ends. Rule of law promotion, he suggests, is best understood as a kind of theatre, the staging of a morality tale about the good life, intended for edification and emulation but blind to its own internal contradictions.
read the prologue
click here for publisher's site
Human Rights and Climate Change, edited by Stephen Humphreys Cambridge University Press, 2009 (Foreword by Mary Robinson)
As the effects of climate change continue to be felt, appreciation of its future transformational impact on numerous areas of public law and policy is set to grow. Among these, human rights concerns are particularly acute. They include forced mass migration, increased disease incidence and strain on healthcare systems, threatened food and water security, the disappearance and degradation of shelter, land, livelihoods and cultures, and the threat of conflict. This inquiry into the human rights dimensions of climate change looks beyond potential impacts to examine the questions raised by climate change policies: accountability for extraterritorial harms; constructing reliable enforcement mechanisms; assessing redistributional outcomes; and allocating burdens, benefits, rights and duties among perpetrators and victims, both public and private. The book examines a range of so-far unexplored theoretical and practical concerns that international law and other scholars and policy-framers will find increasingly difficult to ignore.
click here for publisher's site
click here for preview