Monday, July 28, 2014
Sample Human Rights Syllabi
Many of us in academia spend part of each summer working on syllabi. There are some great resources on the web to support development of law school human rights courses, including many that provide coverage of human rights issues in the U.S.
The Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago spearheaded the creation of a syllabus bank a few years ago. The bank has a good mix of syllabi from law schools, other graduate programs and undergraduate classes. For example, the syllabus bank includes Iowa Professor Amy Weissman's syllabus for Human Rights Advocacy, which includes some excellent readings on local human rights ordinances including Iowa City's human rights ordinance. The syllabus bank is here: https://humanrights.uchicago.edu/page/syllabus-bank.
University of Califonia at Berkeley has also compiled a syllabus bank, with little overlap with the U. of C. bank. The Berkeley Bank is called "Human Rights Syllabi for the College Classroom," but it includes a number of graduate classes as well, including a dozen or so syllabi used in law schools. The Berkeley bank is here: http://learning.berkeley.edu/AIUSA-syl/toc.html
Finally, the UN History Project has compiled syllabi on UN themes, which include many law school human rights syllabi as well as syllabi developed abroad. One example is a syllabus from Professor Elizabeth Pendo's course on Human Rights and Health at St. Thomas School of Law, which sets up human rights analyses of human health experiments conducted in the U.S. such as the Tuskegee and Plutonium experiments. The UN compilation is found here: http://unhistoryproject.org/teach/syllabus-themes.html#_Toc304900497.
With these resources, no one has to reinvent the wheel to bring "human rights at home" into their classroom.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/human_rights/2014/07/resources-for-human-rights-courses.html