Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2003
Publication Information
6 Logos: A J. Catholic Thought & Culture 81 (2003)
Abstract
Through the language of human rights, law can both reflect and constitute some of our most basic ideas about the requirements of human dignity and the human desire for freedom. It captures certain culturally embedded understandings about the nature of the human person in society and carries them forward in time through an institutionalized discourse and practice. This is especially so in those legal traditions that have inherited Western law’s historically consistent orientation toward the individual. Law never makes those sorts of claims in a systematically theoretical way, however. Instead, it is a form of praxis, combining theory and practice, speculation and experience. In this essay I will explore the way that an idea of human rights, one deeply influenced by Catholic traditions of thought about the nature of the human person, was given shape in the mold of historical experience in Latin America and then carried forward through the language of law. Out of that praxis, Latin America forged a distinctive way of talking about and understanding human rights—its own particular accent, as it were, of a language that in the last fifty years has become global.
Recommended Citation
Paolo G. Carozza,
"They are our brothers, and Christ gave His life for them": The Catholic Tradition and the Idea of Human Rights in Latin America,
6 Logos: A J. Catholic Thought & Culture 81 (2003).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/881
Comments
Reprinted with permission of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture.