In Spring 2024, I’ll teach a new graduate course on human rights and public administration. The draft overview is below. I’ll post more details in September.
All people are entitled to certain fundamental rights. This principle, sometimes known as the doctrine of human rights, became central to governance after World War II. Today, debates about the role of government around the world are shaped by understandings about the scope of human rights. For decades, policymakers had invented agencies and programs to protect different rights. Some of these experiments have worked better than others. Governments have learned about the most effective techniques for advancing rights, and the extent to which rights protection may be constrained by realities of administration.
This course will examine the relationship between high-level thinking about human rights and more concrete problems of policy design and implementation. Our objectives are to:
- Understand the origins and content of the doctrine of human rights, and how it compares with other approaches to the definition of a good society.
- Understand how human rights doctrine has shaped the development of government agencies and programs since World War II.
- Consider how the application of human rights doctrine may be constrained by problems of administration.
- Consider how innovations in administration might improve the prospects for successful application and enforcement of human rights doctrine.
In 2024, the course will draw mainly on American experience since World War II, although there will be frequent references to experiments in governance in other countries.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
