Politics of the Globalization of Law

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.

• 1. The Politics of the Globalization of Law; Alison Brysk and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi Part I: The Globalization of Law And Human Rights 2. Treaties, Constitutions, and Courts: The Critical Combination; Wayne Sandholtz 3. The International Criminal Court: Globalizing peace or justice?; Tony Smith and Antonio Gonzalez 4. Global diffusion and the role of courts in shaping the human right to vote; Ludvig Beckman 5. From Pirates to Pinochet: universal jurisdiction for torture; Mark Berlin 6. Courts, advocacy groups, and human rights in Europe; Rachel Cichowski Part II: Hard cases: from rights to justice? 7. The Power and Limits of International Law: Challenging the Bush Administration’s Extra-Legal Detention System; Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi 8. States of emergency vs. courts in Latin America; Claire Wright 9. Law, rights, and barriers in the Israel-Palestine conflict; Gershon Shafir 10. Non-state actors as violators in Mexico: A hard case for global human rights; Alejandro Anaya 11. Extraordinary laws and torture in India in an era of globalization; Jinee Lookaneeta

"In the field of international human rights, the lure of law entices both lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Making rights legal promises precision, predictability and enforceability, in an area crying out for all three. And there are sound reasons to have faith in the law, for sometimes it delivers on these promises. At other times, however, it fails to deliver, or delivers inadequately. The essays in this timely volume spell out the positives and negatives for human rights of relying on the law, using live case studies from around the world, and in ways that are trenchant, practical and forward-looking."—David Kinley, The University of Sydney"This exciting new volume will be of interest to scholars of international relations and law. Taken together, the contributions from a range of interdisciplinary scholars offer cogent arguments for the importance of law and norms in global governance, tempered with a healthy recognition of their limitations."—Chandra Lekha Sriram, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies