The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking rights seriously has never been more urgent. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written as a contribution to this vital debate. Each moreover is written in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, reaching across the myriad constitutive disciplines of law, literature and the humanities in order to present an array of alternative perspectives on the nature and meaning of human rights in the modern world. The taking of human rights seriously, it will be suggested, depends just as much on taking seriously the idea of the human as it does the idea of rights.

Long the province of international law, human rights now enjoys a renaissance of studies and new perspectives from the social sciences. This landmark book is the first to synthesize and comprehensively evaluate this body of work. It fosters an interdisciplinary, international, and critical engagement both in the social study of human rights and the establishment of a human rights approach throughout the field of sociology. Sociological perspectives bring new questions to the interdisciplinary study of human rights, as amply illustrated in this book.

ndrew Jackson - war hero and spokesman for the frontier, the first president from west of the Alleghenies, the first born in a log cabin - fought his way to the White House. Once there, he stood for the rights of common citizens, founded the Democratic Party, expanded the powers of the presidency, paid off the national debt, and postponed civil war by prevailing against the advocates of states’ rights.

This book argues for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the language of judges with respect to the issue of gender discrimination. Drawing its inspiration from Dell Hymes' socially constituted linguistics, the author examines the language of the judicial opinions of four U.S. Supreme Court cases addressing social and legal discrimination against women. Through a linguistic analysis that is informed by a Foucauldian and feminist perspective, this book addresses the complex issues of the power of judges and ideologies, the politics of language use, and feminist contributions to the subject of discrimination and women's rights.

Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts, and Sovereignty is the first comprehensive introduction to the treaties that promised land, self-government, financial assistance, and cultural protections to many of the over 500 tribes of North America (including Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada).
Going well beyond describing terms and conditions, it is the only reference to explore the historical, political, legal, and geographical contexts in which each treaty took shape.