Private Law Harmonization and Human Rights Law (Dubinsky)

The Winter 2005 issue of the Yale Journal of International Law has "Human rights law meets private law harmonization: The coming conflict" by Paul R. Dubinsky. The article "examines efforts to deploy domestic courts around the world to implement the human rights policies not only of their own countries but of the international community as a whole. It argues that this development has run into a stumbling block not foreseen by human rights advocates who, during the formative years of the human rights movement, all but ignored the field of private international law." Private law scholars similarly ignored human rights law victories in national courts, with the result that "no one was especially alert to the likelihood that advances in human rights enforcement would become a perceived threat to the priorities of global business and others with vested interests in the existing principles of private international law." The result: "two movements at the heart of liberal internationalism in the twentieth century are poised for conflict in the twenty-first." The solution identified by Dubinsky is a new unification effort in a very narrow category of extreme cases labelled "atrocity cases". Have a look in Westlaw or Lexis for the full-text.