International Human Rights

Up and running!

Welcome to the course blog for PS368/LSJ320.

Here is the first assignment, which was to be turned in Tuesday, but if you're late registering or didn't get the email, you can still do it:


Answer each of the following questions with a paragraph.

1) Imagine you were asked to construct a list of human rights. Give a
rough sketch of the items you'd consider most important to include. (Do
this before reading any of the readings for Tuesday)
2) Take a look at the US Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Which
of these, if any, is closest to your vision?
3) Why do you think you came to the specific conclusions you did about
human rights? What factors lead to your choices about what to include and
what to exclude?

The second homework assignment, due on Monday, is to read through the UDHR (pp. 24-28 in Weissbrodt et al) and find something to disagree with. In other words, identify an article that enumerates a right you don't think belongs on the list of human rights, or something that should be a human right but doesn't appear on the list, or a right that is worded too narrowly, or a right that's not worded narrowly enough. In a few sentences/short paragraph, explain your thinking--why do you think the UDHR is in error?

There are five short readings for Monday/Tuesday, and they all deal with the theory of human rights; in particular, how expansive human rights should be. They are:

Maurice Cranston, "Human Rights, Real and Supposed"
Henry Shue, selection from Basic Rights
Jeremy Waldron, selection from "Liberal Rights: Two sides of the same Coin"
Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes, "The Cost of Rights"
David Kelley, "A life of one's own"

These readings are all in the course reader, comprising pages 1-23 in said course reader. The Kelley and Shue readings are not in the syllabus, but they are required. The course reader at Rams, on the ave, for the price of 24.98 plus tax. Another post will be up shortly on these readings.

I plan to post a syllabus copy soon, but I can't seem to get the necessary program to function at the moment. When I do I'll post that link here.

posted by David Watkins @ 11:04 AM