LAWS7862 · Law

Human Rights and Inequality

Boston College Law School

The law of human rights is global and rests on a vast array of international human rights conventions, customary international law, and borrowed, transplanted, or migrating constitutional or statutory fundamental rights. These two avenues the international and the domestic are together examined in this course, using recently advanced techniques of comparative law. Our focus is on how the law of human rights conceives of, and addresses, the problem of inequality. In particular, we will study one set of human rights the so-called economic and social rights which include the rights to food, housing, health care, education, and water and sanitation. Of immediate interest to the American law student with a global, transnational, or comparative outlook, or to others interested in the changing idea-base of human rights law, law and political economy, law and equality, and law and social change, the course will emphasize the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and its Optional Protocol, comparative legal developments in South Africa, Colombia, and India, and where and how the United States contributes to this rapidly developing field of law.