Louis Henkin in JILP
In memory of Louis Henkin, who died last month in New York, I recently took to the archives, to see whether any of his work had found its way into the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics. While Henkin’s byline never appeared in any of JILP’s forty-two volumes, his work nevertheless left a mark on our pages.
In the seventh volume of JILP, a review of Henkin’s Foreign Affairs and the Constitution recognized the supreme importance of this work to the field of U.S. foreign relations law. (7 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 203.) Henkin, Stanley Futterman wrote, spoke with “the natural modesty and courage of the true teacher.” But our reviewer soon takes a more critical stance in light of Henkin’s discussion of Vietnam.
Ideas about the proper role of criminal responsibility in juvenile justice tend to fall along a welfare-justice continuum. The welfare approach, prominent at the birth of the modern notion of a juvenile justice system, essentially dismissed the notions of competence and criminal responsibility for children. State authorities intervened to make benevolent decisions on behalf of children, who were portrayed as objects without liberty rights. On the other end of the continuum, the justice approach—towards which clear shifts have occurred in recent decades—places criminal responsibility and children’s alleged competence at the center of juvenile justice. Accountability, due process, and punishment are the foundations of this approach. In Children’s Rights and the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility: A Global Perspective, Don Cipriani points out the flaws of both these approaches and describes the merits of a children’s rights approach as a way to mediate between the tensions of the welfare and justice approaches.
In Human Rights for the 21st Century, Helen Stacy addresses the major critiques of the international human rights framework, offering suggestions on how to fill gaps in the current system in order to strengthen the framework. Stacy organizes the major critiques of the international human rights system into three categories: sovereignty, civil society, and multiculturalism. Responding to each of these critiques, she argues that the law and the courts must continue to play a critical role in the human rights system, but their role must be adjusted to adapt to the challenges posed by the current world order. Stacy’s book is a worthy read, providing a comprehensive analysis of the current challenges of the current human rights framework and offering interesting and practical proposals aimed at improving the present system.