Transovereignty: Separating Human Rights from Traditional Sovereignty and the Implications for the Ethics of International Law Practice

Abstract

Part I of this Article develops some necessary perspective on transovereignty and its importance to law and ethics by reflecting first on traditional sovereignty. A few competing positivist and anti-positivist theories of the emergence of political and legal systems will be briefly reviewed to reveal significantly different pictures of the possible role played by rights-claims in political development. Part II extends one of those theoretical models to help us describe more fully the nature and importance of the special political phenomenon of transovereignty. Part III examines briefly a particularly strong example of transovereignty at work: the impact of the Catholic Church on local political activities in Poland. Widening the Article\u27s perspective, Part IV speculates briefly on the implications of transovereignty for the legal ethics of lawyers practicing human rights law. The Article addresses the question, for example, of whether lawyers as a professional group, with their shared reverence for the rule of law as a governing political ideal - an ideal of orderliness that they view as a “human right” all its own - are themselves becoming a significant transovereign force