Against human rights programs in universities

I criticize them (especially law school human rights clinics) in a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, available here. My argument is that the political activism that takes place through these programs sits uneasily with university commitments to research and pedagogy. In the case of law school clinics, nearly any form of political activism can be justified as furthering “human rights law” because of the ambiguity of this term. Indeed, the term is, in practice, so capacious that clinics can engage in political activism under the banner of human rights law without teaching students any legal skills.