Paolo G. Carozza

Subsidiarity as a Structural Principle of International Human Rights Law

There is an inherent tension in international human rights law between affirming a universal substantive vision of human dignity and respecting the diversity and freedom of human cultures. Although understanding and securing human rights in international law requires us to grapple with that conflict, classic notions of state sovereignty cannot adequately address the issue. The principle of subsidiarity, instead, gives us a conceptual tool to mediate the polarity of pluralism and the common good in a globalized world and helps us make sense of international human rights law. I argue that we should regard subsidiarity as a structural principle of international human rights law.

They are our brothers, and Christ gave His life for them: The Catholic Tradition and the Idea of Human Rights in Latin America

Through the language of human rights, law can both reflect and constitute some of our most basic ideas about the requirements of human dignity and the human desire for freedom. It captures certain culturally embedded understandings about the nature of the human person in society and carries them forward in time through an institutionalized discourse and practice. This is especially so in those legal traditions that have inherited Western law’s historically consistent orientation toward the individual. Law never makes those sorts of claims in a systematically theoretical way, however. Instead, it is a form of praxis,combining theory and practice, speculation and experience. In this essay I will explore the way that an idea of human rights, one deeply influenced by Catholic traditions of thought about the nature of the human person, was given shape in the mold of historical experience in Latin America and then carried forward through the language of law. Out of that praxis, Latin America forged a distinctive way of talking about and understanding human rights— its own particular accent, as it were, of a language that in the last fifty years has become global.

Human Dignity in Constitutional Adjudication

This chapter, for a forthcoming research handbook of comparative constitutional law, provides a broad overview of comparative case law and scholarship regarding the use of the idea of human dignity in constitutional adjudication. The chapter notes both the core common meanings accorded to the status and the principle of dignity, and also the high degree of variation and indeterminacy that they have in a variety of contentious contexts. The chapter then proposes a loose taxonomy of (a) different categories of constitutional issues in which human dignity is invoked, and (b) different functional purposes that the judicial invocation and discussion of human dignity typically serves. The overall aim is to help provide a framework for ongoing research and analysis of human dignity across a variety of different constitutional and international jurisdictions.