The Past, Present, and Future of Rights Scholarship

• Author: Jeffrey R. Dudas, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller and Michael W. McCann
• Pages: 367-381

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction

Rights are ensconced in the American political vernacular. And our rights discourse,

in common with all widely shared languages, not only describes our politics; it

shapes those politics, from contests over social inclusion and cultural diversity, to the

regulation of social services and entitlements, the reconciliation of imperial prac-

tices with egalitarian principles, and the experiences associated with “freedom” in

the modern corporate liberal polity. Contemporary rights discourse is complex,

contradictory, contested, and, above all, constitutive.

Many scholars of rights, ourselves included, have affirmed these insights. Yet our

collective scholarship requires reflection and appraisal. Indeed, we have not always

been reflexive about how our work contributes to a larger, more comprehensive

story of what Stuart Scheingold famously called the “politics of rights” (Scheingold

2004). Is our scholarship simply a collection of like‐minded studies that lack an ori-

enting account of the unique place of rights in contemporary politics, as one

prominent critique alleges (Burke and Barnes 2008)? Or, instead, have we offered a

series of loosely integrated, if typically buried, insights about the practice of rights in

the contemporary world, as another recent account suggests (Lovell 2012a)? Is there

a distinctive politics of rights – one that affirms the pride of place that we socio‐legal

scholars grant to rights‐based movements both in the United States and abroad?

In this chapter, we first review the existing state of the rights mobilization scholar-

ship. We find that there is substantial connective tissue within that scholarship. Yet,

in a manner reminiscent of the more critical assessment, we agree that this connective

tissue has rarely been exposed and has too often lain just out of scholarly reach. It is

this assessment of the existing scholarship that inspires our chapter’s further

The Past, Present, and Future

ofRightsScholarship

Jeffrey R. Dudas, Jonathan Goldberg‐Hiller

andMichael W. McCann

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