Editorial: Upen Baxi--a celebration!

• Author: Paliwala, Abdul

Upen Baxi--A Celebration!

This issue is a celebration of Upendra Baxi's life and work! We started the celebrations with the conference on Human Rights and Global Justice which was organised last year with support from the Warwick School of Law and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at Warwick. This volume consists mainly of revised versions of many of the papers delivered at the Conference. Other papers delivered at the conference also constitute a special appendix to this volume. We are equally delighted at the response of scholars and activists to the idea of a Festschrift. We believe that these papers constitute a compendium of exciting scholarship on the idea of Human Rights and Global Justice. While they are not in general specifically about Upen's work, they represent significant works of scholarship in an areas to which Upen has made significant contributions.

I would like to express my special thanks to Celine Tan as a collaborator in both the conference organisation and the publication of this volume and to Masha Baraza and Paul Trimmer as collaborators in this publication.

Apart from the wealth of scholarship represented in this volume, we have had such an impressive response from those who wished to be included that we plan to continue this celebration with a second volume. So please contact us if you wish to include a scholarly article, an activist response or wish to make a comment on Upen's life work.

I do not intend to go into details of Upen's life. We include a brief bio-data. More significantly, these find their place quite aptly in the pantheon of Four Southern Voices as described by William Twining in this volume. We also proudly present Upen's homage to Julius Stone, one of his mentors. This piece not only signifies the intellectual debt owed to Stone, it also gives us the opportunity for a differentiation. Upen rightly writes in praise of Stone as a scholar and in particular justifies Stone's assiduous referencing as a Talmudic intertextual episteme signifying respect for the "Fellowship of Juristic Knowledges". Upen's own work shows equal respect for the "Fellowship". In particular, his analysis of Amartya Sen on Human Rights in Chapter 2 of Human Rights in a Post-human World (Baxi 2007) indicates that nature and level of respect which can only arise from the gifting of rigorous criticism. However, Upen transcends Stone in a number of ways. Firstly Upen's Fellowship is a panhistorical global...