The U.S. Supreme Court and the Domestic Force of International Human Rights Law
By (author) Stephen A. Simon
Publication date:
25 July 2016Length of book:
222 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498534703
The core idea underlying human rights is that everyone is inherently and equally worthy of respect as a person. The emergence of that idea has been one of the most significant international developments since the Second World War. But it is one thing to embrace something as an aspirational ideal and quite another to recognize it as enforceable law. The continued development of the international human rights regime brings a pressing question to the fore: What role should international human rights have as law within the American legal system?
The U.S. Supreme Court and the Domestic Force of International Human Rights Law examines this question through the prism of the U.S. Supreme Court’s handling of controversies bearing most closely on it. It shows that the specific disputes the Court has addressed can be best understood by recognizing how each interconnects with an overarching debate over the proper role to be accorded international human rights law within American institutions. By approaching the subject from the justices’ standpoint, this book reveals a divide in the Court between two fundamentally different orientations toward the domestic impact of the international human rights regime.
The U.S. Supreme Court and the Domestic Force of International Human Rights Law examines this question through the prism of the U.S. Supreme Court’s handling of controversies bearing most closely on it. It shows that the specific disputes the Court has addressed can be best understood by recognizing how each interconnects with an overarching debate over the proper role to be accorded international human rights law within American institutions. By approaching the subject from the justices’ standpoint, this book reveals a divide in the Court between two fundamentally different orientations toward the domestic impact of the international human rights regime.
Simon analyzes the developing battle between internationalist Supreme Court justices who push for greater accommodation of foreign law against those who view this not only as an infringement on American sovereignty but as a perversion of the country’s democratic principles. What is at stake is nothing less than whether the United States fully subscribes to human rights standards. The book is written with great intelligence and insight and it most assuredly will be the standard text in the scholarly treatment of the domestic incorporation of international human rights law.