Sen Defends Human Rights at HLS Celebration

Harvard Law School (HLS) marked the 15th anniversary of its Human Right Program (HRP) this past weekend with a three-day series of panels, discussions.

Nobel Laureate and former Lamont University Professor of Philosophy and Economics Amartya K. Sen gave a keynote address to an audience of HLS graduates, program donors and prominent human rights activists at a Saturday night dinner in Pound Hall.

The program's founder, Smith Professor of Law Henry J. Steiner, said the organization was created to incorporate the lingua franca of the human rights movement into the framework of the modern-day legal education.

"Our very strong aim was to make human rights as fully a part of a legal education as all the traditional courses, from torts to taxes," Steiner said.

Steiner said his program began modestly, with about 50 students in only two courses.

However, as the struggle for human rights around the world became more visible, so did his program, which now boasts over 200 students enrolled in six courses.

"Today, [the discussion about human rights] is in newspapers, in the public discourse. It's now part of the air, and that wasn't true 15 years ago," Steiner said.

According to Susan Culhane, a human rights program administrator, every available seat was taken for Sen's speech. There was a waiting list of 30 students for the limited number of spaces on the Pound Hall balcony.

After a dinner of wine and poached salmon, many attendees praised Sen's knowledge of his subject but joked that his lecture on the philosophical foundations of the human rights debate was heavy fare.

"I thought he was going to speak of things that were more readily digestible," Steiner quipped.

Sen, who left Harvard to serve as master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, presented his listeners with an analysis of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's accusation that human rights were nothing more than "nonsense on stilts."

"It wasn't your usual after-dinner speech," said Sephen Livingstone, an HLS graduate and law professor from Belfast.

Sen explained that according to Bentham, rights and obligations come in pairs. If person A has a right to some X, then some person or organization has a corresponding obligation to secure X for him.

Bentham took issue with the open-endedness of human rights--rights that exist prior to the state or any other agent that can secure them, Sen said.

"Bentham's argument was that humans in nature are no more born with human rights than they are with clothes--rights require legislation just as clothes require tailoring," Sen said.

Yet according to Sen, there are ethical imperatives that exist prior to any state, and it is from these imperatives that the concept of human rights draws its strength.

You must "do the sensible thing for others within the limits of what you can and what you know," he said.