This collection brings together a range of international contributors to stimulate discussions on time and international human rights law, a topic that has been given little attention to date. The book explores how time and its diverse forms can be understood to operate on, and in, this area of law; how time manifests in the theory and practice of human rights law internationally; and how specific areas of human rights can be understood via temporal analyses. A range of temporal ideas and their connection to this area of law are investigated. These include collective memory, ideas of past, present and future, emergency time, the times of environmental change, linearity and non-linearity, multiplicitous time, and the connections between time and space or materiality. Rather than a purely abstract or theoretical endeavour, this dedicated attention to the times and temporalities of international human rights law will assist in better understanding this law, its development, and its operation in the present. What emerges from the collection is a future – or, more precisely, futures – for time as a vehicle of analysis for those working within human rights law internationally.

This book explores times, spaces and imaginings relating to international law through the lens of queer theory. For some time now, queer theorists and legal scholars who think with queer theory have asked, what happens when queer theory moves out of its home base of gender and sexuality? The chapters in this book begin to answer this question by applying insights from queer theory to a diverse array of international law topics, from travaux préparatoires and international judging to the environment, oceans and outer space. While some contributions maintain a focus on gender and sexual diversity, all are characterised by a shift away from questions about LGBTIQA+ people towards wider discussions about power, normality, difference and liberation in international law. Through these engagements, the book demonstrates how queer theory can provide insights into a range of international law issues by allowing us to ‘make strange’ the taken-for-granted and contributing to a broader practice of reading for difference rather than dominance. The book engages with contemporary challenges in international law, from the climate crisis to new military technologies, such as automated naval vessels. It also showcases the diversity of approaches to queering international law that are emerging, with some authors drawing attention to the violence of (neo-)colonial international law and others engaging in more utopian and reparative thinking. This collection of queer theoretical engagements with international law will be invaluable to scholars of international law and international relations with an interest in critical approaches to these areas; as well as to researchers, activists and practitioners working in cultural, gender, queer and/or postcolonial studies.

This book challenges the correspondence theory of judicial fact construction – that legal rules resemble and subsume facts ‘out there’ – and instead provides an account of judicial fact construction through legally produced times- or adjudicative temporalities- that structure legal subject and event formation in legal judgement. Drawing on Bergsonian and Gadamerian theories of time, this book details how certain adjudicative temporalities can produce fully willed and autonomous subjects through ‘time framed’ legal events – in effect, the paradigmatic liberal legal subject – or how alternative adjudicative temporalities may structure legal subjects that are situated and constituted by social structures. The consequences of this novel account of legal judgement are fourfold. The first is that judicial fact construction is not exclusively determined by the legal rule (s) but by adjudication’s production of temporalities. The second is that the selection between different adjudicative temporalities is generally indeterminate, though influenced by wider social structures. As will be argued, social structures, framed as a particular type of past produced by certain adjudicative temporalities, may either be incorporated in the rendering of the legal event or elided. The third is that, with the book’s focus on criminal law, different deployments of adjudicative temporalities effect responsibility ascription. Finally, it is argued that the demystification of time as that which structures event and subject formation reveals another way in which to uncover the politics of legal judgement and the potential for its transformative potential, through either its inclusion or its elision of social structures in adjudication’s determination of facts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of legal judgement, legal theory and jurisprudence.

This book provides a critical assessment of how judges reason in the adjudication of historical injustices. The practice of adjudication in historical cases of injustice require that, in determining collective responsibility, judges impart meaning to past injuries. This book analyses the narrative mechanisms through which this meaning is produced. Focusing on three areas of adjudication–racial discrimination, post-colonial extractivism and the climate crisis–the book’s analysis focuses on the issue of time. It considers the interplay of how historical injustice adjudication is shaped by temporal presuppositions and how it enacts a particular idea of temporality. As experiences of injustice are narrated, the book demonstrates how some of those experiences are included and others are excluded within the process of adjudication. Drawing on legal theory, legal epistemology and the philosophy of time, the book thus offers an instructive, and provocative, account of how collective responsibility is determined in cases of historical injustice. This book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of legal theory, legal reasoning, socio-legal studies, comparative jurisprudence and transitional justice.

Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.

This book explores the double-edged role of time in the regulation of migration from legal, philosophical and socio-cultural perspectives.

Women and the LGBT community in Russia and Turkey face pervasive discrimination. Only a small percentage dare to challenge their mistreatment in court. Facing domestic police and judges who often refuse to recognize discrimination, a small minority of activists have exhausted their domestic appeals and then turned to their last hope: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The ECtHR, located in Strasbourg, France, is widely regarded as the most effective international human rights court in existence. Russian citizens whose rights have been violated at home have brought tens of thousands of cases to the ECtHR over the past two decades. But only one of these cases resulted in a finding of gender discrimination by the ECtHR-and that case was brought by a man. By comparison, the Court has found gender discrimination more frequently in decisions on Turkish cases. Courting Gender Justice explores the obstacles that confront citizens, activists, and lawyers who try to bring gender discrimination cases to court. To shed light on the factors that make rare victories possible in discrimination cases, the book draws comparisons among forms of discrimination faced by women and LGBT people in Russia and Turkey. Based on interviews with human rights and feminist activists and lawyers in Russia and Turkey, this engaging book grounds the law in the personal experiences of individual people fighting to defend their rights.