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In this survey human rights course, students will learn about how the distinct methodologies, assumptions, and vocabulary of particular disciplinary communities affect the way scholars and practitioners trained in these fields approach, understand, and employ human rights concepts. We will discuss the principal historical and philosophical bases for the modern concept of human rights, as well as the international legal frameworks meant to protect and promote these rights. Class sessions will include a mix of seminar discussions and guest lectures by distinguished Stanford faculty from across the university. This course fulfills the gateway course requirement for the minor in Human Rights. HUMRTS 101 was previously listed as GLOBAL 105.

This course will examine the arc of an atrocity. It begins with an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarship on the causes and enablers of mass violence genocide, war crimes, terrorism, and state repression. It then considers political and legal responses ranging from humanitarian intervention (within and without the Responsibility to Protect framework), sanctions, commissions of inquiry, and accountability mechanisms, including criminal trials before international and domestic tribunals. The course will also explore the range of transitional justice mechanisms available to policymakers as societies emerge from periods of violence and repression, including truth commissions, illustrations, and amnesties. Coming full circle, the course will evaluate current efforts aimed at atrocity prevention, rather than response, including President Obama¿s atrocities prevention initiative. Readings address the philosophical underpinnings of justice, questions of institutional design, and the way in which different societies have balanced competing policy imperatives. Cross-listed with LAW 5033.

Historical backdrop of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals. The creation and operation of the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals (ICTY and ICTR). The development of hybrid tribunals in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, including evaluation of their success in addressing perceived shortcomings of the ICTY and ICTR. Examination of the role of the International Criminal Court and the extent to which it will succeed in supplanting all other ad hoc international justice mechanisms and fulfill its goals. Analysis focuses on the politics of creating such courts, their interaction with the states in which the conflicts took place, the process of establishing prosecutorial priorities, the body of law they have produced, and their effectiveness in addressing the needs of victims in post-conflict societies.

Disability Studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary academic field that examines disability as a social, cultural and political phenomenon. This is an introductory course to the field of disability studies and it aims to investigate the complex concept of disability through a variety of prisms and disciplines including social psychology, the humanities, legal studies and media studies. This course also focuses on the multiple connections between the study of disability and other identities including class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, and also includes a comparative look at how disability is treated across cultures. Some of the topics covered in the class are disability and the family, the history of the disability rights movement, the development of disability identity and its intersectionality, antidiscrimination law, the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, bioethical dilemmas pertaining to disability and more.

War exposes the most barbarous face of human nature, so the notion that societies can impose order and morality on warfare may seem paradoxical and even futile. Yet throughout history, people have sought to¿and indeed succeeded in¿humanize war. Who are the political actors that have attempted this Herculean task? What strategies have they taken to do so? What are the laws, norms, and organizations structure the ways in which wars are fought? This course will answer these questions, drawing primarily from political science theory and evidence.

The course will examine the way in issues now considered to be at the core of human rights concerns have been dealt with in different historical and cultural contexts. The themes of the course will center on human trafficking and slavery, sexual violence, and mass atrocity crimes such as genocide. The course will thus not be a chronological survey but rather thematic and comparative in its approach, including consideration, of course, of ancient societies in Greece, Rome, and China.

May be repeated for credit. Students using these units toward the Minor in Human Rights must take for a letter grade. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.