Stephen Riley

W. M. Reisman, The Quest for World Order and Human Dignity in the Twenty-first Century: Constitutive Process and Individual Commitment

Given the breadth, sophistication, and idiosyncrasy, of this collection of lectures it should be treated as a general, but not introductory, analysis of public international law and will be attractive to scholars of the theory of international law. It is situated somewhere between a textbook covering core topics in international law and a collection of the author’s essays. As a consequence Reisman provides us with components of a theory of public international law but not the sustained and unified analysis we might expect of a monograph. As such it could be judged by two standards: whether it is synoptic enough to be a good survey and coherent enough to be considered a theory. As a survey Reisman’s book is usefully wide-ranging and consistently analytical but it is by no means comprehensive or systematic. As a theory, it should be seen as an interesting contribution to the New Haven School of international legal study, but a contribution that exposes the difficulties of finding normative unity within international law even using a principle as malleable as human dignity. It is, nonetheless, more than the sum of its parts and the distinctive character, and many incisive moments, of the work make it an attractive text. The New Haven School was, and is, a critical school of international law and politics offering an immanent critique of international law. International law must be assumed to be the law of a society if it is to be law at all. That society has functions, policies, goals, and values that can be disaggregated into the values of the individuals that inhabit them. These basic interests or values include ‘enlightenment’, ‘well being’, and ‘respect’ and can, in turn, be distilled into the idea of human dignity, sometimes meaning the sum of these values, sometime meaning a harmonious relationship between individuals and the system as a whole (a

Dignity as the Absence of the Bestial: A Genealogy

The legal and moral importance of human dignity has obscured the distinctiveness of dignity simpliciter as a behavioural and anthropological phenomenon. Precisely those aristocratic connotations of dignity that appear dissonant within democratic discourse — social elevation, grace and forbearance — are crucial to understanding how dignity has served to identify the difference between animals and humans. From the taxonomic and symbolic significance of the upright gait to Victorian propriety, dignity has correlated a perceived absence of animal characteristics with normative demands for self‐controlled, upright behaviour. Accordingly, this article posits a genealogy of dignity, a history of dignity as one means by which humans have articulated the absence of the bestial. However, it is suggested that this genealogy cannot be insulated from the metaphysics that underpins human dignity: the reification of humanity and the assumption of a qualitative difference between human and animal.

Architectures of intergenerational justice: Human dignity, international law, and duties to future generations

ABSTRACT This article draws attention to the constitutive requirements of intergenerational justice and exposes the limitations of regulative arguments based on international human rights law. Intergenerational justice demands constraining the regulative freedom of the international community, and it is tempting to assume that adequate constraints are already contained within existing treaties including international human rights treaties. In fact, intergenerational justice demands bespoke constitutional norms at the international level, and it demands entrenching constitutional norms. International human rights law per se implies neither of these constitutive propositions and both are problematic in light of the present structure of international law. Nevertheless, a combination of arguments concerning intergenerational justice and the systemic implications of human dignity yield a more constitutive account of human rights and therefore an internal critique of the overall architecture of international law.

Contemporary dialogues with fascist law and jurisprudence

It’s easy to miss the jokes in Kafka. Scholarship and biography have recast Kafka’s stories as self-referential parables of anomie written by a tortured neurotic who did not want to be read. In a cruelly accurate portrayal of how the academic and biographical industries can be a barrier to understanding, Alan Bennett’s play Kafka’s Dick satirises how biographical prurience over Kafka’s life has obscured the fact that he wrote simple stories, steeped in black humour, about myopic men vainly trying to do impossible things. The two books considered here – Law after Auschwitz and Darker Legacies of Law in Europe – follow Bennett’s theme. They share a desire to strip away received assumptions and counter-factual conjectures in order to explore fascist legal thought and activity on their own terms. On the way they offer interesting parallels with contemporary European law, medico-legal thought, administrative law, penal theory and so on. But, more simply, these books, like Kafka’s, recount the stories of men – self-styled members of the master race attempting to take over the world – desperate to analyse and systematise laws created by authorities who despise law. And failing. They failed to see that a war economy is not conducive to enduring legal reform. They failed to see that basing contract and criminal law on community feelings is going to be a frustrating business.