ABSTRACT
When in 2002 I took up a position as Rausing Director of LSE’s newly established Centre for the Study of Human Rights, I faced an immediate problem. The Centre had been the shared creation of a group of inspired (and inspiring) academics whose disciplinary homes ranged across the social sciences spectrum: counted among the prime movers were Christine Chinkin from Law, Stan Cohen from Sociology and Fred Halliday from International Relations with joining them (only a little later) Peter Townsend from Social Policy. Located in Sociology when I arrived, did the still tiny Centre now inevitably follow its new Director into his disciplinary home, law? Most of my new departmental colleagues assumed that this would be the case, but I left it exactly where it was. There was more to human rights than human rights law – and in any event my avaricious discipline had enough invasive capacity so far as human rights were concerned not to need to have its latest potential conquest served up to it on a plate. I have never doubted my decision: the study of human rights works best when the wider interpretations of what this entails are not always at risk of being hauled back to legal reality by an (understandably) blinkered disciplinary concern for a particular kind of text or mode of argument. That is inevitably what a disciplinary approach rooted in law must do, what Robert Knox wearing his Marxist hat here asserts human rights law invariably does – scrutinise the small picture to the exclusion of the really interesting stuff that makes up the picture you are actually looking at. (More on Knox’s fascinating chapter later.)
