Nickel delivers lecture at Duke

11/13/2008

Nickel delivers lecture at Duke 

James Nickel 
James W. Nickel
     Professor James W. Nickel lectured recently at Duke University on "Human Rights: Challenging the Indivisibility Doctrine."
     Nickel, who is visiting at Georgetown Law Center this year, is an affiliate professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the School of Global Studies. He teaches and writes in human rights law and theory, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and political philosophy.
     The talk was based on his paper, "Rethinking Indivisibility: Towards a Theory of Supporting Relations between Rights."
     "Indivisibility is the idea that no human right can be fully realized without fully realizing all other human rights," according to the paper's abstract. "When indivisibility occurs it has the practical consequence that countries cannot pick and choose among rights. This article offers a framework for understanding supporting relations between rights and gives a number of arguments against strong claims of indivisibility.
     "A central thesis is that the strength of supporting relations between rights varies with quality of implementation. Rights with low quality implementation provide little support to other rights. This is why early U.N. formulations of indivisibility said that it occurs when the rights in question are fully realized. Even if strong claims about the indivisibility were true under high quality implementation they would be of limited relevance to developing countries because high quality implementation of rights is generally not an immediate possibility in those countries. Developing countries do not run afoul of indivisibility if they implement some rights before others."
     From 1982 to 2003 Nickel was a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado where he served as director of the Center for Values and Social Policy (1982-88) and as chair of the philosophy department (1992-1996).
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