Group-differentiated rights, or rights that attach on the basis of membership in a particular social or cultural group, are an increasingly common and controversial aspect of modern pluralistic legal systems. Eric Mitnick offers the first comprehensive treatment of this important form of right. The book describes and critically assesses the group-differentiated form of 'right' from within analytical, constitutive and liberal theory. It further examines the extent to which group-differentiated rights constitute aspects of human identity, and it asks whether this should be a cause for concern from the perspective of liberal theory. The more detailed normative work advanced in the book contextually applies the constitutive understanding of rights and the principles of liberal membership to particular examples of group-differentiated citizenship. Such examples range from ascriptive statuses such as slavery and alienage, to more affirmative classifications, such as those apparent in the contexts of civil unions and affirmative action, finally to the claims of religious and other cultural groups for official recognition and accommodation of group-based beliefs and practices.

Critically assessing the group-differentiated form of 'right' from within analytical, constitutive and liberal theory, this book examines to what extent the group-differentiated form of right serves to constitute aspects of human identity and whether this should be a cause for concern.

The Concept of Group Rights in International Law offers a critical appraisal of the concept of group rights in international law on the basis of an extensive survey of existing group rights in contemporary international law. Among some of its findings is the observation that an ideological way of arguing about this legal category is widespread among scholars as well as practitioners; it sees this ideological framing as one of the main reasons why international law has so far been very reluctant to provide group rights and to call them by their name. Accordingly, the book re-evaluates the concept based on the experience with existing group rights in international law and pleads for a more pragmatic approach. Despite limitations with the concept, the overall thesis is that there is a role for group rights as a pragmatic tool allowing for a principled approach to substate groups through international law. Such an approach could turn group rights into an arguably minor, but nevertheless, highly relevant legal category of international law.

Rights are often invoked in contemporary moral and political debates, yet the nature of rights is contested. Rights and Demands provides the first full-length treatment of a central class of rights: demand-rights. To have such a right is to have the standing or authority to demand a particular action of another person. How are such rights possible? Everyday agreements are generally acknowledged to be sources of demand-rights, but what is it about an agreement that accounts for this? The central thesis of this book is that joint commitment is a ground of demand-rights, and that it may be the only ground. In developing this thesis Margaret Gilbert argues in detail for joint commitment accounts of both agreements and promises. The final chapter explains the relevance of its argument to our understanding of human rights. Engaging where appropriate with contemporary rights theory, Gilbert provides an accessible route into this area for those previously unfamiliar with it.

Collective cultural rights are commonly perceived as the most neglected or least developed category of human rights. Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective endeavours to challenge this view and offers a comprehensive, critical analysis of recent developments in distinct areas of international law and jurisprudence, from every region of the world, in relation to the scope, legal content, and enforceability of such rights. Leading international scholars explore the conceptualisation and operationalisation of collective cultural rights as human rights, encompassing community rights, and discuss the ways in which such rights may collide with other, mostly individual, human rights. As such, Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective offers a cross-cutting and original overview on how the protection, recognition and enforcement of collective cultural rights affect the development, changes and formation of general international law norms.

In Self-determination and Minority Rights in China, Linzhu Wang examines the rights of China’s minorities from the perspective of self-determination. The book offers an insight into the ethnic issues in contemporary China, by examining the principle of self-determination in shaping China’s ethnic grouping and appraising the rights of the minorities and their limits. Based on a comprehensive survey of the practice of self-determination in the Chinese context and the Regional Ethnic Autonomy regime, the author seeks to answer the questions of how the ethnic policies and laws have come to be, why they are problematic, and what can be done to promote minority rights in China.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support." By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers, and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty, and welfare in the century to come.

This book analyses the mobilisation of race, rights and the law in Malaysia. It examines the Indian community in Malaysia, a quiet minority which consists of the former Indian Tamil plantation labour community and the urban Indian middle-class. The first part of the book explores the role played by British colonial laws and policies during the British colonial period in Malaya, from the 1890s to 1956, in the construction of an Indian "race" in Malaya, the racialization of labour laws and policies and labour-based mobilisation culminated in the 1940s. The second part investigates the mobilisation trends of the Indian community from 1957 (at the onset of Independent Malaya) to 2018. It shows a gradual shift in the Indian community from a "quiet minority" into a mass mobilising collective or social movement, known as the Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF), in 2007. The author shows that activist lawyers and Indian mobilisers played a crucial part in organizing a civil disobedience strategy of framing grievances as political rights and using the law as a site of contention in order to claim legal rights through strategic litigation. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers examining the role of the law and rights in areas such as sociolegal studies, law and society scholarship, law and the postcolonial, social movement studies, migration and labour studies, Asian law and Southeast Asian Studies.

Reproduction of the original: The Right to Privacy by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis

Through the Global Lens uses a global perspective to analyze human affairs. This text looks at each of the six social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, psychology, and geography), and uses case studies, feature film analyses, maps, and photos to highlight important historical events and concepts throughout.