Professor Alexandra Huneeus won “Best Paper 2019” honors for her article, "Between universalism and regional law and politics: A comparative history of the American, European, and African human rights systems,” co-authored with Mikael Rask Madsen.

Huneeus and Madsen received the award from the peer-reviewed International Journal of Constitutional Law at its annual conference, held earlier this month in Santiago, Chile.

Here is the abstract from their article, which shared first place with an article by David McGrogan of Northumbria Law School in the United Kingdom:

This article represents a first systematic attempt to compare the institutional histories of the regional human rights systems in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. It argues that the three main regional human rights systems have enacted common scripts that have produced relatively similar institutional models across the regions under scrutiny. This is not to deny, however, the enormous variation among the systems; nor is it to deny the role of local social and political contexts in shaping them. Rather, the analysis seeks precisely to identify both the common institutional scripts and the regional particularities to render the general history of regional human rights courts and commissions—a key component of the larger history of human rights that has been largely overlooked in current debates. We argue that the dynamics of the Cold War initially shaped the bounds within which actors in each region came to realize, re-shape, and re-signify common institutional scripts.

Submitted by Law School News on October 24, 2019

This article appears in the categories: Faculty, Features, UW Women in Law

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