Preface

This study was planned and brought to fruition over the past couple of years. It has been the source of many thoroughly enjoyable excuses for conversation between the two of us, and also provided the platform for a quite extraordinarily energetic and creative conference at Birkbeck College in London in November 2011. Our idea for the conference was to bring together not only the contributors to this volume but also to a sister volume that we are editing. The result was a four-day event marked by papers that combined strong interdisciplinary engagements with fascinating multidisciplinary styles. Like blindfolded wine tasters we played the game of telling discipline from style without checking first who the speaker was and we were not often wrong – our lawyers, a good proportion of this volume’s contributors, did not let us down, demonstrating that good lawyers can always engage with the world outside without sacrificing the analytical strengths that have made them excellent in their own field in the first place.

Human rights law has migrated from a little-known corner of international law to the whole of law and to the entirety of social relations. To collate a compendium on human rights law is an impossible task. A compendium is a ‘shortcut across a mountain’ and by extension a shortening, an abridgment, an abbreviation. Can such heavy concepts as those entailed in human rights law be shortened or abridged? A compendium must be a shortcut to the most weighty matter, to gains saved over centuries. Can there be a shortcut for human rights law? In this sense, we freely acknowledge that the present collection is caught in a paradox that can be resolved only partially. We have done our best in the selection of contributors to capture the international nature of our subject and the vibrancy of current debates within it. Of course we would have liked an even wider range of writers, from more places and different backgrounds, but the demands of space precluded this.