Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
The Handbook of Human Rights (Routledge, 2011)
Hannah Arendt approaches human rights as someone who lived through their failure in the first half of the 20th century. A German Jew, Arendt understood antisemitism, experienced the denationalization of the Jews in Germany, and witnessed how the world and even the diaspora Jewish community largely ignored the plight of European Jewry. Arendt also saw how other minority peoples in Europe - Germans in Russia, Slovaks in Czechloslavakia, muslims in Yugoslavia, Gypsies, and many others - were systematically denaturalized, persecuted, and killed - all, as she emphasized, within the strictures of national and international law. For Arendt, the failure of human rights is a fundamental fact of modern times.
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Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Some Thoughts on Laurie Ackermann's Dignity Jurisprudence
Acta Juridica (2008)
- Reprinted in Dignity, Freedom and the Post-Apartheid Legal Order, ed. by Alfred Barnard (Jutta, 2009).
Justice Laurie Ackermann’s decision in Ferreira is a study in tonal dissonance. Ackermann’s 232 paragraph legal opinion begins slowly. It plots out the judicial history of the case; it wades through questions of jurisdiction and standing; and it frames the question of the case all without offering a narrative version of the facts.
One must read carefully and between the lines to discern that the case concerns a plaintiff, Clive Ferreira, who was employed by Prima Bank Holdings Ltd., a corporation that had gone bankrupt and ceased operations. Mr. Ferreira was summoned to give sworn testimony about the affairs and property of Prima Bank. He declined, asserting a right not to offer self-incriminating testimony. In doing so, Ferreira violated section 417 of the Companies Act that requires such testimony in administrative proceedings and also expressly allows that such testimony ‘may thereafter be used in evidence’ in a criminal proceeding.
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Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
Philosophy in Review (December, 2007). Review of Peg Birmingham's Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
Apologies - this article is not currently available.
Error-Centricity, Habeas Corpus, and the Rule of Law as the Law of Rules
Louisiana Law Review v. 64 (2004)
On August 10th, 1927, as hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in New York, Paris, Berlin and in cities from South America to the Soviet Union, as workers around the world called general strikes and took to the streets, and as, in the words of one commentator, “the world waited,”1 a team of attorneys representing Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti sought out United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Trailed by journalists to Holmes’ Beverly, Massachusetts summer residence, the attorneys pleaded with the Justice to grant Sacco and Vanzetti a writ of habeas corpus. If Holmes were to grant the writ, the murder verdict against the two Italian-American anarchists would be nullified, and they would be set free pending a new trial. As Sacco and Vanzetti were scheduled to be executed that evening, time was short and tensions were high.
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