ABSTRACT
Human rights legality stems from the codification of international law, a practice that employs functional rationality for the need for interstate negotiations, diplomatic compromise, and the accommodation of nonrights goals and values. Similar to Naomi Mezey’s “law as culture as law,” the designation of the “juris-cultural” hopefully presents a language that avoids separating law and culture but confronts their uneasy entanglements. When the law school operates as a kind of funnel through which other disciplines are fed into the law itself, what happens is that the intellectual expertise of the legal left actually facilitates the movement of the left from being critics to participants. The conception of sovereignty as an interactive configuration of the relationship among nation-states has always been a concern of international law, since sovereignty posits not a simple transactional kind of interaction among rulers. Modern constitutional and administrative law in China present “rights” as something embedded in a fairly eclectic range of frameworks.
