Patrick Macklem (University of Toronto), The Sovereignty of Human Rights (Oxford Univ. Press, 2015).
"The Sovereignty of Human Rights advances a legal theory of international human rights that defines their nature and purpose in relation to the structure and operation of international law. Professor Macklem argues that the mission of international human rights law is to mitigate adverse consequences produced by the international legal deployment of sovereignty to structure global politics into an international legal order. The book contrasts this legal conception of international human rights with moral conceptions that conceive of human rights as instruments that protect universal features of what it means to be a human being."
—Publisher's description
Ari Berman, Give us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
"Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.
—Publisher's Description
Andrew Woolford (Univ. of Manitoba), Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2015).
"At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the 'Indian problem' in both the United States and Canada. With the goal of permanently transforming Indigenous young people into Europeanized colonial subjects, the schools were ultimately a means for eliminating Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation-building. Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the 'Indian problem' as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the 'solution' of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences."
—Publisher's Description
Stephen Breyer, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (Knopf, 2015).
"In his lucid new book, 'The Court and the World,' Breyer contends that events in the world have effectively resolved the foreign law controversy. Playing the judge as enlightened modern technocrat, he offers a reasoned elaboration of the mounting costs that judicial isolationism would entail in our increasingly interconnected world. Globalization, he argues, has made engagement with foreign law and international affairs simply unavoidable."
—John Fabian Witt, New York Times (Link to Full Review)
