ABSTRACT
The litigation of human rights cases in domestic courts provides fresh context for an old and periodic ambiguity in our juridical history. In international matters according to this view, Congress and especially the executive branch are entitled to change their institutional minds, to deploy a rhetoric, to practice the dark science of diplomacy, to be in short "political" and for that reason immune from meaningful judicial review. Human rights litigation may seem particularly vulnerable to abstention on these grounds, even if what qualifies as human rights litigation is somewhat obscure at the margins. In a second category of cases, international human rights norms may be invoked not as the rule of decision but as an interpretive guide in the construction of statutory and constitutional text. The clearest conceptual limits on the "one-voice" orthodoxy are well-illustrated in the human rights cases filed against Ferdinand Marcos.
