Human Dignity

Aharon Barak is a faculty member at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel, and a visiting professor at Yale Law School. In 1975 he was appointed Attorney General of the State of Israel, becoming Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel in 1978 and serving as President from 1995 until his retirement in 2006. He has also served as a lecturer, professor and Dean at the Law School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

• Introduction; Part I. Fundamental Concepts and History: 1. The various aspects of human dignity; 2. The intellectual history of the social value of human dignity; 3. Human dignity as a value and as a right in international documents; 4. Human dignity as a value and as a right in constitutions; Part II. Human Dignity as a Constitutional Value: 5. Purposive constitutional interpretation; 6. The role of human dignity as a constitutional value; 7. Three types of models for determining the content of the constitutional value of human dignity; Part III. Human Dignity as a Constitutional Right: 8. Recognition of the constitutional right to human dignity and its content; 9. Human dignity as a framework right (mother-right); 10. The area covered by the right to human dignity; Part IV. Human Dignity in Comparative Law: 11. Human dignity in American constitutional law; 12. Human dignity in Canadian constitutional law; 13. Human dignity in German constitutional law; 14. Human dignity in South African constitutional law; 15. Human dignity in Israeli constitutional law.

'An engaging explication of a legal value whose time has come. The twenty-first century will be the century of dignity.' Human Rights Law Review