Human Dignity, Judicial Reasoning, and the Law: Comparative Perspectives on a Key Constitutional Concept

This volume explores how national and international human rights courts interpret and apply human dignity. The book tracks the increasing deployment of the concept of human dignity within courts in recent decades. It identifies how human-dignity-based arguments have expanded to cover larger sets of cases: from the right to life or the right to integrity or anti-discrimination, the concept has surfaced in disputes about political and social rights and rule of law requirements, such as equality or legal certainty. The core message of the book is that judges understand, interpret, and apply human dignity differently. An inflation in the judicial recourse to human dignity can saturate the legal environment, depriving the concepts as well as human-rights-based narratives of salience, and threaten the predictability of court decisions. The book will appeal to philosophers of law, constitutional theorists and lawyers, legal comparativists, and international law specialists. While being dedicated specifically to human dignity jurisprudence, the book touches on many aspects of judiciary and as such will also be of interest to researchers studying legal reasoning, interpretation and application of the law and courts, as well as social philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists of law, politics, and religion.

Brett G. Scharffs is The Rex E. Lee Chair and Professor of Law, and Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark School of Law

Andrea Pin is Full Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Padua

Dmytro Vovk is Visiting Associate Professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and Director of the Center for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University