Human rights issues arise more and more often in an intellectual property context. ' Intellectual property and human rights' is the first comprehensive analysis of this emerging nexus of legal issues. In twenty-one incisive essays, well-known authorities in both intellectual property law and human rights law present in-depth analysis and discussion of such essential topics as the following: The human rights credentials of copyright and other intellectual property rights; The relations between copyright and freedom of speech and of expression, from the perspectives of both North American and European law; The relevance to copyright of the public interest defence in European law; The way trade marks and human rights interfere; The human rights and morality aspects of biotechnological patents and stem cell patents; The interaction between human rights and geographical indications; and The fundamental rights of privacy in an intellectual property environment. In the years to come, more and more lawyers will be confronted with issues involving the interaction of intellectual property and human rights. As a groundbreaking work ' Intellectual property and human rights' will be seen as a cornerstone of the debate. Practitioners, academics and policymakers in both fields will immediately recognize its value as a springboard to the informed future development of this new and crucial area of legal theory and practice.

Williams School of Law. Melvin Urofsky, Virginia Commonwealth University Doctoral Program in Public PolicyDistributed for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy

An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.

This first English translation of Pierre Manent’s profound and strikingly original book La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme is a reflection on the central question of the Western political tradition. In six chapters, developed from the prestigious Étienne Gilson lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and in a related appendix, Manent contemplates the steady displacement of the natural law by the modern conception of human rights. He aims to restore the grammar of moral and political action, and thus the possibility of an authentically political order that is fully compatible with liberty. Manent boldly confronts the prejudices and dogmas of those who have repudiated the classical and Christian notion of “liberty under law” and in the process shows how groundless many contemporary appeals to human rights turn out to be. Manent denies that we can generate obligations from a condition of what Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau call the “state of nature,” where human beings are absolutely free, with no obligations to others. In his view, our ever-more-imperial affirmation of human rights needs to be reintegrated into what he calls an “archic” understanding of human and political existence, where law and obligation are inherent in liberty and meaningful human action. Otherwise we are bound to act thoughtlessly and in an increasingly arbitrary or willful manner. Natural Law and Human Rights will engage students and scholars of politics, philosophy, and religion, and will captivate sophisticated readers who are interested in the question of how we might reconfigure our knowledge of, and talk with one another about, politics.

This collection of essays analyses how diversity in human identity and disadvantage affects the articulation, realisation, violation and enforcement of human rights. The question arises from the realisation that people, who are severally and severely disadvantaged because of their race, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, class etc, often find themselves at the margins of human rights; their condition seldom improved and sometimes even worsened by the rights discourse. How does one make sense of this relationship between the complexity of people's disadvantage and violation of their human rights? Does the human rights discourse, based on its universal and common values, have tools, methods or theories to capture and respond to the difference in people's lived experience of rights? Can intersectionality help in that quest? This book seeks to inaugurate this line of inquiry.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.