Legal Cultures and Human Rights

Cultural diversity, as expressed for instance in different normative orders or legal cultures, poses both a practical and a theoretical challenge to the idea of universal human rights. In the present volume, the authors seek to address and contain this challenge with a view to the changing nature of the global society. While 'culture' is sometimes signposted as an obstacle to human rights on the ground, this volume suggests that in so far as the global 'culture of human rights' is primarily seen as a formal and institutional order based on a particular view of equal human worth, local cultures cannot trump it. The main point is that the culture of human rights is inclusive of all and must maintain a standard by which all peoples and cultures can measure their own performances. Further, and as demonstrated in the present volume from a range of disciplines such as law, literature, history and anthropology, culture is not a mental prison but a particular outlook upon the world, for ever changing in response to new experiences and insights.