Along with at least 65% of other Americans, law students and lawyers believe there is a right to health care that ought to be enforced in the United States.  For many of us, common sense dictates that people should be able to control how, when, and whether we bear children and that we must have access to accurate information, quality services, and resources necessary to support these decisions.

However, many of us also learn in law school that common sense isn’t the foundation of the U.S. legal system.  When we study Constitutional Law, we discover that this great document doesn’t actually hold the government accountable for anything affirmative, but rather restrains itself from intervening in people’s lives.  On the surface, that sounds reasonable and just.

Until we learn that other countries’ constitutions actually hold governments accountable to respect, protect, and fulfill rights — protecting people from the injustices that occur when recognized rights and values are not backed up by strong public policies and the resources necessary to implement them.  This concept is both foreign and fascinating.  So, we enroll in International Law, Transnational Law, and Human Rights courses to dig deeper.  Unfortunately, these courses tend to focus on trade, war, or humanitarian law — very rarely on reproductive rights.

LSRJ believes that human rights law has much to offer us, establishing a framework for envisioning government as a positive force that ensures adequate health and well-being for all people.  Human rights law provides both analytical and strategic tools for reproductive justice advocates, positioning human dignity at the center of claims for the protection, promotion, and fulfillment of basic rights.  In that vein, LSRJ is excited to honor this Human Rights Day by promoting our newest set of resource materials for law students — the Human Rights Law Primer.  This guide lays out where reproductive rights are embedded in international human rights law and provides useful commentary to help us think about how human rights law can inform our RJ advocacy in the U.S. context and abroad.

LSRJ is committed to the idea that human rights are relevant not only in developing countries with legal systems less robust than our own.  We believe there is an important role for human rights law and strategies in both international and domestic reproductive justice work.  With that in mind, the theme of this year’s Sarah Weddington Writing Competition is Reproductive Rights as Human Rights, which we hope will encourage innovative analysis that draws on international, domestic, and comparative law.  We also offer our Human Rights on the Homefront Easy-Event-in-an-Envelope to help LSRJ members educate themselves and their peers about the application of human rights law in domestic legal contexts.

As always, we encourage you to take advantage of LSRJ’s resources to help raise the profile of RJ issues in law school and to work towards the vision of respect for the dignity of all people that Human Rights Day represents.

Liz Kukura & Jill E. Adams

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 8:35 pm and is filed under human rights, law, law school, leadership, lsrj events, what is reproductive justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.