Human Rights Quarterly

I met Bill Simmons many years ago at an annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The Human Rights Section of the APSA sponsored a workshop on teaching human rights and he presented on his approach to problem-based learning. He explained that he ran an entire semester course on human rights without a syllabus. This opening statement certainly caught our attention. He then proceeded to explain that his students selected to work on the issue of femicide in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. The students wanted to know how to hold the perpetrators of over 300 murders accountable for what they argued were gross human rights violations. They eventually settled on the use of the US Alien Tort Claims Act (ACTA), promulgated in 1789, which grants federal courts in the United States original jurisdiction over any civil action brought by a foreign national (alien) for a tort in violation of international law or a US treaty. The students were marked on their individual and collective contribution for this project, and helped write an article published in the Yale Human Rights and [End Page 703] Development Review.¹ He discusses this work in a book chapter entitled "Making the Teaching of Social Justice Matter," in which he argues for an "anti-hegemonic phronetics" that asks that as researchers and educators engaged in social justice issues we must "get involved in doing politics" through case-based education and experiential learning.²

Simmons' approach to research-led education is a model for human rights scholars and I was so impressed with his work that I later invited him to join me on an externally funded project (along with Rhona Smith) to provide human rights research methodological training in China over an eighteen month period. Simmons, Smith and I worked with fifteen Chinese scholars on topics of their own choosing and guided them through the formulation of their research questions, the specification of their research designs, the collection and analysis of their data, and the writing up of their projects into publishable quality. The work of these scholars was then collated into a book entitled Human Rights in Our Time, which was simultaneously published in Chinese and English and launched in Oslo.³ Throughout this project, Simmons displayed a wide-ranging intellectual capacity for philosophy, philosophy of science, normative political theory, and data analysis and research methods, as well as care and attention to the needs of the scholars on the program. He comfortably and effortlessly moved from deep theorizing on the nature of the self and phenomenology to multivariate regression, demonstrating a capacity for understanding different ways of knowing the social and political world and guiding scholars through their research journey.

The work and capacity I saw on display during these two occasions found their way into Simmons' book Human Rights Law and the Marginalized Other.⁴ In this book, he draws heavily on the work of Emmanuel Levinas (among additional philosophers of "the other") and uses the notion of "cauterization" to argue why human rights law in its current form is inappropriately framed and must be formulated through a preferential treatment for the marginalized. I had the opportunity to discuss this with him in one of the episodes of my podcast The Rights Track⁵ in which he explains the idea of how the language of human rights law seals off (or cauterizes) marginalized people and thereby undermines its true purpose to help the most vulnerable in society. This theme of preferential treatment harks back to the idea of "preferential option for the poor" found in Gaudium et spes Pastoral Constitution of the Second Vatican Council in 1968 and the idea of "pedagogy of the oppressed" from Brazilian educator Paulo Freire originally published in the same year.⁶

In my discussions over the years, Simmons started talking about his idea for a [End Page 704] book on the joy or joyfulness of human rights. He was concerned that the whole field of human rights had not...