Northeastern Law’s Center for Global Law and Justice 2025 Speaker Series, Issues in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law
Featuring:
Matiangai Sirleaf
Nathan Patz Professor of Law, Maryland Carey Law
The stories we are told and promulgate around the world about the struggles to be treated as human and to have rights recognized, respected, protected, and fulfilled matter. The Master Narrative in human rights foregrounds the empires with the least moral authority to speak on slavery and racial violence as the generative settings for understanding why norms prohibiting such conduct are necessary. Looking only at what the powerful were(are) able to enact into law produces a shallow vision of human rights, which leaves Black and other subordinated peoples at the margin. The movements towards freedom of the enslaved, formerly enslaved, and those subjected to other forms of unfreedoms, shifted images, ideas, political imaginations, and expanded the frame of humanity. It is imperative to alter the settings where human rights narratives traditionally emerge and swap the underdeveloped characters in human rights to protagonists in their own narratives. By centering the relegated histories of rights priorities of Black and other subordinated peoples, we can critically investigate whether the legal regime of human rights is bringing us closer to freedom.
Respondent:
Adam Hosein
Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Law; Director of the Politics, Philosophy and Economics Program; Northeastern University
Questions?
Please contact Professor Zinaida Miller at [email protected].
The lecture series is open to the Northeastern University community and the general public.
Oct 23, 2025
1:35 pm to 3:15 pm