Submissions

Thank you for your interest in the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.

We expect to begin reviewing submissions for Volume XII (Spring 2009) in Summer 2008.

Please check back for updated information concerning dates and policies for Volume XII submissions.

In preparing your article, we strongly encourage you to consider the Journal's mandate, and to view past issues, available on our Archive page, for examples of successful submissions. The Journal is especially interested in publishing works that address, directly or indirectly, the following questions, though this list is by no means exhaustive. We frequently publish works that address these questions through the use of case studies and field work based on author experiences, though theoretical and analytical pieces are welcome as well.

Please note that we do not publish student notes by non-Yale Law School students.

• Are human rights and development in irresoluble tension? Are there unique, current situations that can belie, exemplify, or complicate our thinking about this tension?
• Is the rule of law the capstone of a long process of effective development? Or is the rule of law essential to development from the very beginning? When and why do the rule of law and development conflict? Are there illustrative current examples?
• What is the role of lawyers, legal thinkers, and legal institutions in development?
• Should legal reform in the developing world focus on judicial accountability, access to courts, formal legal education, clinical education, establishing public interest organizations, drafting better laws and constitutions, or something else? Is there a way of putting these different elements together into a coherent program of legal reform?
• Some theorists contend that it is intellectually dishonest to speak of "globalization." The introduction of foreign economic, social, and political changes is always followed and resisted by local adaptations and innovations which are, in the end, more significant than large-scale "global" emergences. Perhaps a better neologism is "glocalization." Is this critique persuasive?
• Is the discourse of human rights culturally contingent on a Western, post-Enlightenment world view? Can human rights ideas survive a "transplant" to nations with different intellectual and cultural traditions? Are there alternative conceptions of human rights that are challenging to, and perhaps more compelling than, those proceeding from the Western tradition?
• Are human rights matters for the court, or for the legislature and the realm of public debate and opinion? What are the perils in entrusting the invigilation of human rights to the judicial branch? Might a trustworthy executive or a democratically accountable legislature do a better job?
• Consider the following paradox: China is a developing nation, as is Burma. China depends on Burma for oil, gas, and electricity. Those resources are necessary to sustain China's development and, it is often argued, to bring its citizens out of poverty. Yet many also argue that trade with Burma props up a brutal dictatorship with no respect for human rights, thus stalling political, social, and economic development in that country. Is China's development at cross-purposes with Burma's, such that it is impossible to be a consistent advocate of development? Or are these kinds of paradoxes soluble by creative development policy?
• How should human rights considerations, as a practical matter, inform development policies and projects?
• Is international development an inherently or inevitably imperialist enterprise?
• To what extent, if at all, should economic development take priority over social and political development? Can a human rights approach cast light on this question?
• Development economist William Easterly argues that endemic, widespread corruption in what is commonly known as the "developing world" is a forceful objection against implementing any large scale international development project. Can human rights and/or legal approaches counter this objection by helping development projects to effectively resist and root out corruption?