Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

The human rights field is often criticized for its lack of enforcement and implementation, lawyering methodologies, and its roots in imperialism, exceptionalism, and Eurocentric values. In response to some of these critiques, human rights scholars and advocates have embraced more grassroots approaches that in many instances resemble the movement lawyering methodologies employed in social justice advocacy in the United States. In the same way that movement lawyers have centered impacted communities and engaged in long term, coordinated legal and political advocacy to achieve normative change, human rights advocates have used the international human rights framework to exert political pressure, facilitate coalition building, and articulate new theories of change. Despite these similarities, movement lawyering and human rights advocacy operate in silos, and there is a gap in the scholarship examining the two methodologies in tandem.

This Article is the first to explore the intersection of international human rights advocacy and modern social movement lawyering. It evaluates the international human rights legal framework and related advocacy from a movement lawyering perspective, theorizing that movement lawyering principles and methodologies can be tools to allay common critiques and limitations in international human rights work. To demonstrate how, it reframes international human rights law and advocacy as something more than a legal framework limited to "legal" advocacy, highlighting how it also functions as a rhetorical tool, providing shared language across borders, and how human rights advocacy provides an "ecosystem approach" that resembles the integrated advocacy model in the movement lawyering space. Additionally, this Article suggests that movement lawyering principles can bring international human rights strategies into the fold of contemporary domestic movements, moving the human rights framework to a place where it can more productively contribute to the difficult and long-term project of challenging structural power dynamics in the United States.

Publication Citation

66 B.C. L. Rev. 1833 (2025).

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