DOCSLIB.ORG

Samuel Moyn from Communist to Muslim: European Human Rights

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Samuel Moyn from Communist to Muslim: European Human Rights Samuel Moyn From Communist to Muslim: European Human Rights, the Cold War, and Religious Liberty A series of decisions by the European Court of Human Rights in the era of the pan-European headscarf controversies has thrown open an important debate over the principle of religious freedom. The court, most recently in the spectac- ular decision of Lautsi v. Italy permitting cruci- fixes in Italian schools, adopts a forgiving atti- tude toward Christian symbols and practices but does not offer comparable protection to Muslim symbols and practices suppressed by state legisla- tion and administrative decisions.1 The renowned European devotion to a neutral state above con- tending religions seems to be more image than reality. Do the cases then reflect a Christian Islam- ophobia in the principled garb of secularism? Commentators sympathetic to the decisions see nothing wrong with the court or the European Convention of Human Rights norm of religious freedom. At worst, there is simply a mistake in the way the court applies the norm (see Decaux 2010). But a more thoroughgoing criticism insists that the decisions follow from a deeper and longer syndrome, and these more uncompromising crit- ics are right to resist ascribing the results to acci- dent alone. For both defenders and critics of the The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:1, Winter 2014 doi 10.1215/00382876-2390428 © 2014 Duke University Press 64 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Winter 2014 court’s mission to sustain a supranational human rights regime—indeed, to be in the vanguard of such regimes and thus a model for the world to emulate—much is at stake in deciding how to interpret the history of reli- gious freedom. Is it possible that it is poisoned at the root? This essay offers an alternative to both common answers, arguing instead that contemporary headscarf and related cases in the European Court draw not solely upon the exclusionary legacy of Western secularism but also upon the exclusionary legacy of Western hostility to secularism. One of the avatars of the con- temporary Muslim, whose practices are viewed as inimical by the court to democracy’s essentials, is the communist. In several of the cases, the European Court itself works with a histori- cal narrative of the rise of secularism close to that offered by John Rawls in his late “political liberalism.” In this story, the secular political space is the outcome of a bloody era of early modern religious warfare: What began with the nervous truce of a modus vivendi evolved into an overlapping consensus featuring not just peace but justice, too (Rawls 1993). In this narrative, reli- gious freedom is a long-term companion of the creation of a secular political space, in which a transcendent state rises above the attempt by sects to infuse public matters with private faith. That faith is protected in private on condi- tion of its staying there. Ironically, those skeptical of European secularism see the same tight relationship between religious freedom and secular poli- tics. They agree that the former became early allied to and swept up in the rise of the latter. But at least in one version of the critique of secularism, it is little more than orientalism in a new disguise (Anidjar 2006). More gener- ally, much critical writing about the cases treats the bias against Muslims in the European Court cases as entirely unsurprising, since it does not seem that easy to separate European secularism from the Christian legacy it ven- triloquizes. On this view, precisely because of religious freedom’s long-term links to the creation of a secular political space, it has proved discriminatory in practice (Danchin 2011). Yet other features of the history of religious freedom point in a very different direction than either the enthusiastic or the diagnostic account suggests. I believe that the early modern record of the principle of religious freedom implies as much; forsaking that background, this essay analyzes the era when religious freedom was internationalized through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Europeanized in the form of the Euro- pean Convention itself—finalized when the Cold War created new circum- stances for the ideological salience of religious freedom. In its earliest ori- gins, religious freedom was a device to continue the struggle for the true Moyn • From Communist to Muslim 65 Christianity, not to end that struggle. So in its mid-twentieth-century itera- tion, religious freedom was not part of a secularist enterprise, whether one defines it as the project of privatizing religious affiliation, creating a naked public square, or—as the critics hold—concealing the Christian faith behind the mask of neutrality. The notion of accidental Christian misuses of an entirely secular principle is thus misleading. On the contrary, religious free- dom was historically a principle that was most often intended to marginalize secularism. Indeed, it was as part of such a campaign that the European Convention in general and its Article 9 on religious freedom first appeared little more than a half century ago. Article 9 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950) has two clauses. Announcing the principle of religious freedom, it begins by closely following the Univer- sal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teach- ing, practice and observance” (art. 9[1]).2 But the European Convention also assumes that, unlike the inviolable right to the sanctity of the internal forum of conscience, the right to manifest internal beliefs can be overridden: “Free- dom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limita- tions as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or mor- als, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others” (art. 9[2]). Already before 9/11 the European Court—which had not really taken up Article 9’s promise of religious freedom until the 1990s—had shown itself willing to interpret that last provision in ways that treated Islam as a second-class religion not entitled to the same sort of consideration as the Christian faith.3 Since then, it has issued a series of decisions that grant European states wide latitude to ban Muslim symbols. In Dahlab v. Switzer- land, a schoolteacher who had converted from Christianity to Islam and began to wear a headscarf to work was told by authorities to choose between her headscarf and her job. A Swiss federal court held that public safety and order justified the administrative decision. But if Dahlab dealt with a teacher, allowing the court to emphasize the power of a role model in the classroom (though no student or parent had complained), Leyla Sahin v. Turkey, like Bel- gin Dogru v. France and a series of cases testing France’s famous 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols, concerned Muslim students. The most visible and discussed of these cases, Sahin, involved a medical student 66 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Winter 2014 who had worn the headscarf in her training in Vienna but was told she could not do so at her Turkish certification test. The Dogru court, following the Sahin ruling, emphasized “the State’s role as the neutral and impartial orga- niser of the exercise of various religions, faiths and beliefs.” The state’s ser- vice as secular arbiter above the fray, hard-won outcome of Reformation con- flict, remained “conducive to public order, religious harmony and tolerance in a democratic society” (para. 62). The court certainly did prominently refer to local interpretations and ingrained traditions (in France, Switzerland, and Turkey) of secularist political order. Invoking its well-known judge-made doctrine of “margin of appreciation”—a perennially controversial principle of deference to national policy—it found that these particular European countries might well have the latitude to forge especially stringent interpretations of secular space. But in doing so, the court also developed its own interpretation of what demo- cratic societies require, an interpretation that the headscarf offends. This “democratic minimum” analysis, I want to argue, proves to be a valuable clue to the legacy of history in the court’s cases.4 In this connection, consider Refah Partisi v. Turkey (2003), a decision declining to uphold the claims of Turkish applicants whose Islamist political party had been banned. Though already strongly implied in Dahlab, the later case made it even clearer that, in the court’s judgment, Muslim practices can be plausibly viewed as threats to a democratic minimum, justifying state abridgment of rights to mani- fest; and it was cited again in Sahin and Dogru for precisely that proposi- tion.5 This complementary element of Article 9 jurisprudence—in which the minimum “necessary in a democratic society” (art. 9[2]) does not protect the religious practices but allows for their suppression—turns out to be equally important to evaluating the legacy of history as the court’s deference to national policy below. For this conceptual basis on which the cases rest had nothing originally to do with religion in general or Islam in particular. Instead, its source lies in Cold War anxiety that secularist communism would topple Christian democracy. If so, the secularism of the European Court’s headscarf cases is at least partly a recent artifact, following from the collapse or even “death” of Christianity in living memory on the European continent (Brown 2009).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • University Humanities Committee 2018-19
    University Humanities Committee 2018-19 Amy Hungerford (Chair) Amy Hungerford is Bird White Housum Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at Yale. She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, especially the period since 1945. Her new monograph, Making Literature Now (Stanford, 2016) is about the social networks that support and shape contemporary literature in both traditional and virtual media. A hybrid work of ethnography, polemic, and traditional literary criticism, the book examines how those networks shape writers’ creative choices and the choices we make about reading. Essays from the project have appeared in ALH and Contemporary Literature. Prof. Hungerford is also the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago, 2003) and Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, 2010) and serves as the editor of the ninth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E, “Literature Since 1945” (forthcoming in 2016). Francesco Casetti Francesco Casetti is the author of six books, translated (among other languages) in French, Spanish, and Czech, co-author of two books, editor of more than ten books and special issues of journals, and author of more than sixty essays. Casetti is a member of the Advisory Boards of several film journals and research institutions. He sits in the boards of MaxMuseum, Lugano (Switzerland), and MART museum (Rovereto (Italy). He is a member of the Historical Accademia degli Agiati (Rovereto, Italy), correspondent member of the Historical Accademia delle Scienze (Bologna), and foreigner member of the Historical Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche (Naples). He is General Editor of the series “Spettacolo e comunicazione” for the publishing house Bompiani (Milano).
    [Show full text]
  • Coals to Newcastle? on the Anglo-American Reception
    www.ssoar.info Coals to Newcastle? On the Anglo-American Reception of Pierre Rosanvallon Moyn, Samuel Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Zur Verfügung gestellt in Kooperation mit / provided in cooperation with: Verlag Barbara Budrich Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Moyn, S. (2016). Coals to Newcastle? On the Anglo-American Reception of Pierre Rosanvallon. ZPTh - Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie, 7(1), 7-16. https://doi.org/10.3224/zpth.v7i1.03 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY-SA Lizenz (Namensnennung- This document is made available under a CC BY-SA Licence Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen) zur Verfügung gestellt. (Attribution-ShareAlike). For more Information see: Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.de Diese Version ist zitierbar unter / This version is citable under: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-60038-0 Coals to Newcastle? On the Anglo-American Reception of Pierre Rosanvallon1 Samuel Moyn* Keywords: Pierre Rosanvallon, Claude Lefort, Mark Lilla, liberalism, democracy Abstract: This essay assesses the reasons for the so far minimal reception of Pierre Rosanvallon’s writings in the English-speaking world. Some of the factors suggested include his resistance to a liberal triumphalism that framed the Anglo-American presentation of the larger body of thought to which he contributed and his focus on hexagonal French history, especially in the nineteenth century. The essay closes with a comparison of the reception of his approach with that of Thomas Piketty’s recent bestseller on a similar topic.
    [Show full text]
  • Front Matter
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-14257-1 - Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Frontmatter More information Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Has there always been an inalienable “right to have rights” as part of the human condition, as Hannah Arendt famously argued? The contributions to this volume examine how human rights came to define the bounds of universal morality in the course of the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century. Although human rights are often viewed as a self- evident outcome of this history, the essays collected here make clear that human rights are a relatively recent invention that emerged in contingent and contradictory ways. Focusing on specific instances of their assertion or violation during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in various arenas of global politics, providing an alterna- tive framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented. In doing so, this volume captures the state of the art in a field that historians have only recently begun to explore. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Research Director at the Center for Research in Contemporary History, Potsdam, Germany, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. He is the author of the prizewinning The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society 1840–1918 (2007). Currently, he is preparing a short history of human rights and a book on Berlin in the wake of the Second World War. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-14257-1 - Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Frontmatter More information Human Rights in History Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Samuel Moyn, Columbia University This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of human rights today.
    [Show full text]
  • Review Article French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography*
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Columbia University Academic Commons Review Article French Democracy between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography* Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University INTRODUCTION No book has affected the study of modern French history in the last twenty-five years more than Franc¸ois Furet’s Penser la Re´volution franc¸aise (translated as Interpreting the French Revolution).1 Furet’s interpretation of the French Revolu- tion and French history more generally, and the revisionism it inspired, are by now well known. This essay interprets the intellectual career of Pierre Rosanvallon— one of Furet’s most interesting students, recently honored by election to the Col- le`ge de France, his nation’s most prestigious academic institution—as an attempt to test the flexibility of Furet’s paradigm for understanding French history and its amenability to new ends. Rosanvallon’s work responds to the most obvious limi- tation of Furet’s project, both interpretive and political: its ambivalence about the democratic project itself. The question Rosanvallon’s exercise prompts, however, is just how fundamental a break with Furet’s model is required to write a history of democracy that corrects for what seems to be an uncertainty about the viability of democracy, especially about its extension. This essay argues that Rosanvallon’s very attempt to operate within Furet’s framework in the name of a more democratic
    [Show full text]
  • “The Place of Religion in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor's Explanation
    “The Place of Religion in a Secular Age: Charles Taylor’s Explanation of the Rise and Significance of Secularism in the West” By Douglas H. Shantz, PhD My lecture this evening focuses on the latest book by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor entitled, A Secular Age (2007).1 The book has been attracting wide atten- tion in the scholarly community and, I think, justly so. He offers valuable insights into the complex factors that have given rise to secularism in the West. Taylor also offers insight into the continuing strength of religious faith in our day and explains why many secularization theorists, who prophesied the demise of religion, have been wrong. It is in a spirit of respect and appreciation that I offer my reading of Taylor’s new book. Introducing Charles Taylor: A Canadian Thinker on the World Stage Charles Taylor, longtime professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, has been called “the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today” and “one of the most influential and prolific philosophers in the English-speaking world.”2 He is one of the best-known Canadian academics on the inter- national stage. Charles Taylor has dined in Rome with the Pope, discussed the break-up of Czechoslovakia in Prague with Vaclav Havel, debated in Montreal with Pierre Trudeau. He has lectured in Berkeley, Frankfurt, Oxford and Jerusalem, Vienna and New York…3 His wide recognition and international appeal are not surprising. He writes in English, French, and German and he engages with thinkers and traditions of thought in all three 1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
    [Show full text]
  • Can Human Rights Bring Social Justice? Twelve Essays
    Changing perspectives on human rights Can human rights bring social justice? Twelve essays Edited by Doutje Lettinga & Lars van Troost illustratie? Changing perspectives on human rights 1 Can human rights bring social justice? Twelve essays Strategic Studies initiated by Amnesty International Netherlands Published in October 2015 by Amnesty International Netherlands ISBN: 978-90-6463-370-6 Cover image: Spanish protest against the Euro zone leaders, agreed Pact for the Euro, the cutbacks in the social policy and the economic crisis in Barcelona on 19 June 2011. © Peter Scholz/Shutterstock.com Changing perspectives on human rights 2 Can human rights bring social justice? Twelve essays Changing perspectives on human rights Can human rights bring social justice? Twelve essays Edited by Doutje Lettinga & Lars van Troost Changing perspectives on human rights 3 Can human rights bring social justice? Twelve essays Can human rights bring social justice? Twelve essays Also in this series: Doutje Lettinga and Lars van Troost (eds), Debating The Endtimes of Human Rights. Activism and Institutions in a Neo-Westphalian World, July 2014. www.amnesty.nl/endtimes Thijs van Lindert and Doutje Lettinga (eds), The future of human rights in an urban world. Exploring opportunities, threats and challenges, September 2014. www.amnesty.nl/urbanworld Other publications by Strategic Studies: Thijs van Lindert and Lars van Troost (eds), Shifting power and human rights diplomacy: Brazil, November 2014. www.amnesty.nl/RisingPowerBrazil Doutje Lettinga and Lars van Troost (eds), Shifting power and human rights diplomacy: India, March 2015. www.amnesty.nl/RisingPowerIndia Doutje Lettinga and Lars van Troost (eds), Shifting Power and Human Rights Diplomacy: South Africa (forthcoming) Strategic Studies is an initiative of Amnesty International Netherlands.
    [Show full text]
  • The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
    The Last Utopia Human Rights in History Samuel Moyn The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2010 Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moyn, Samuel. The last utopia : human rights in history / Samuel Moyn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04872-0 (alk. paper) 1. Human rights—History. I. Title. JC571.M88 2010 323.09—dc22 2010012998 Contents Prologue 1 1 Humanity before Human Rights 11 2 Death from Birth 44 3 Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement 84 4 The Purity of This Struggle 120 5 International Law and Human Rights 176 Epilogue: The Burden of Morality 212 Appendixes 231 Notes 241 Bibliographical Essay 311 Acknowledgments 323 Index 327 The Last Utopia Prologue When people hear the phrase “human rights,” they think of the highest moral precepts and political ideals. And they are right to do so. They have in mind a familiar set of indispensable lib- eral freedoms, and sometimes more expansive principles of social protection. But they also mean something more. The phrase implies an agenda for improving the world, and bringing about a new one in which the dignity of each individual will enjoy secure international protection. It is a recognizably utopian program: for the political standards it champions and the emotional passion it inspires, this program draws on the image of a place that has not yet been called into being. It promises to penetrate the impregnability of state bor- ders, slowly replacing them with the authority of international law.
    [Show full text]
  • Redalyc.Martin Jay: an Encounter Between Philosophy and History
    Revista de Ciencia Política ISSN: 0716-1417 [email protected] Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Chile JAY, MARTIN Martin Jay: An Encounter Between Philosophy and History Revista de Ciencia Política, vol. 36, núm. 1, 2016, pp. 383-392 Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Santiago, Chile Disponible en: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=32446000017 Cómo citar el artículo Número completo Sistema de Información Científica Más información del artículo Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal Página de la revista en redalyc.org Proyecto académico sin fines de lucro, desarrollado bajo la iniciativa de acceso abierto REVISTA DE CIENCIA POLÍTICA / VOLUMEN 36 / Nº 1 / 2016 / 383 – 392 MARTIN JAY: AN ENCOUNTER BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY Martin Jay: Un encuentro entre la filosofía y la historia1 MARTIN JAY Entrevistas University of California, Berkeley CIENCIA POLÍTICA ABSTRACT The interview took place in Santiago, Chile in November 2015 and was conducted by Gonzalo Bustamante, professor of political philosophy at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. Martin Jay in the course of this interview addresses the links between Critical Theory, Cambridge School, and Conceptual History, giving special attention to an “event” as a limited category, critical rationality and the contextual genealogies of the different branches of historical studies mentioned before. Jay concludes that one of the possible limitations of the “in context’ work of authors such as Quentin Skinner and the so- called Cambridge School is given by the impossibility to reduce the perlocutionary effect of events to the illocutionary intentions of the authors. In line with Claude Romano, in the interpretation of Jay, an ‘event’ always has an “an-archic” condition that makes its limitation to previous networks of meaning impossible.
    [Show full text]
  • Christian Nationalism in the United States
    religions Christian Nationalism in the United States Edited by Mark T. Edwards Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Christian Nationalism in the United States Special Issue Editor Mark T. Edwards MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor Mark T. Edwards Spring Arbor University USA Editorial Office MDPI AG St. Alban-Anlage 66 Basel, Switzerland This edition is a reprint of the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) from 2016–2017 (available at: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/christian_nationalism). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: Author 1; Author 2. Article title. Journal Name Year, Article number, page range. First Edition 2017 ISBN 978-3-03842-438-3 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03842-439-0 (PDF) Articles in this volume are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY), which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book taken as a whole is © 2017 MDPI, Basel, Switzerland, distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Table of Contents About the Special Issue Editor .................................................................................................................. v Mark Edwards Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction Reprinted from: Religions 2017, 8(5), 93; doi: 10.3390/rel8050093 ........................................................
    [Show full text]
  • By Omer Bartov | NYR Daily | the New York Review of Books 7/5/19, 1022 AM
    An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum | by Omer Bartov | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books 7/5/19, 10)22 AM An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Andrea Orzoff, Timothy Snyder, and Anika Walke, et al. On June 17, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, posted an Instagram live video discussing the detention camps along the southern US border as “concentration camps” in which she used the phrase “Never Again.” This drew sharp criticism the following day from Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, and others for allegedly misappropriating a slogan associated with the Holocaust. After several days of heated media and political debate, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a statement on June 24 condemning the use of Holocaust analogies. We received the following open letter addressed to the director of the museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, delivered by the signatories on July 1. —The Editors To Director Bloomfield: We are scholars who strongly support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Many of us write on the Holocaust and genocide; we have researched in the USHMM’s library and archives or served as fellows or associated scholars; we have been grateful for the Museum’s support and intellectual community. Many of us teach the Holocaust at our universities, and have drawn on the Museum’s online resources. We support the Museum’s programs from workshops to education. We are deeply concerned about the Museum’s recent “Statement Regarding the Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies.” We write this public letter to urge its retraction.
    [Show full text]
  • Harvard Law School Faculty 20–​21
    Harvard Law School Faculty – 1 Professors and Assistant Professors of Law 3 Professors Emeriti and Emeritae 48 Affiliated Harvard University Faculty 55 Visiting Professors of Law 61 Climenko Fellows 73 Lecturers on Law 75 Endowed Chairs at Harvard Law School 95 2 HARVARD LAW SCHOOL FacULTY 2020–2021 Professors and Assistant Professors of Law William P. Alford Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies Courses: Engaging China, Fall 2020; The Comparative Law Workshop, Fall 2020; Comparative Law: Why Law? Lessons from China, Spring 2021. Research: Chinese Legal History and Law, Comparative Law, Disability Law, International Trade, Law and Development, Legal Profession, Transnational/Global Lawyering, WTO. Representative Publications: An Oral History of Special Olympics in China in 3 volumes (William P. Alford, Mei Liao, and Fengming Cui, eds., Springer 2020) Taiwan and international Human Rights: A story of Transformation (Jerome A. Cohen, William P. Alford, and Chang-fa Lo, eds., Springer 19); Prospects for The Professions in China (William P. Alford, Kenneth Winston & William C. Kirby eds., Routledge 1); William P. Alford, To Steal A Book Is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (Stanford Univ. Press 1995). Education: Amherst College B.A. 197; St. John’s College, Cambridge University LL.B. 197; Yale University M.A. 1974; Yale University M.A. 1975; Harvard Law School J.D. 1977. Appointments: Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, 199–18; Director, East Asian Legal Studies, 199– present; Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, 2002–2020; Chair, Harvard Law School Project on Disability, 4–present; Jerome A.
    [Show full text]
  • Institute for Global Law and Policy Harvard Law School
    Institute for Global Law and Policy Harvard Law School Annual Report – 2014 – 2015 Part I: Report of Activities A. Summary of Academic Year: 2014-2015 a) Research and Scholarship a. Summary Statement Founded in 2009, The Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School is a collaborative faculty effort to nurture innovative approaches to global policy in the face of a legal and institutional architecture manifestly ill-equipped to address our most urgent global challenges. Global poverty, conflict, injustice and inequality are also legal and institutional regimes. The IGLP explores the ways in which they are reproduced and what might be done in response. We aim to provide a platform at Harvard for new thinking about international legal and institutional arrangements, with particular emphasis on ideas and issues of importance to the global South. Professor David Kennedy serves as Institute Director. The Institute continues the tradition developed at Harvard’s European Law Research Center by focusing on young scholars and policy makers from the global South, who bring new ideas and perspectives to comparative and international legal research and policy. The IGLP aims to facilitate the emergence of a creative dialog among young experts from around the world, strengthening our capacity for innovation and cooperative research. The Institute has built strong relationships with faculty at a wide range of foreign institutions, represented by the scholars who participate in our Advisory Councils. We provide a focal point at Harvard Law School for faculty and students interested in new thinking about issues of global governance and international affairs. Each year, we sponsor a variety of conferences, workshops and symposia, both in Cambridge and in collaboration with our friends abroad.
    [Show full text]