Welcome
Dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on human rights, the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series (WPS) publishes innovative papers by established and early-career researchers as well as practitioners. The goal is to provide a productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, activists, practitioners, and the public.
Authors from all disciplines and institutions are welcome to submit papers. We publish papers on a variety of human rights and social justice topics, and we particularly welcome papers focusing on issues and topics affecting the Global South. We are especially interested in the following: reproductive justice and sexual rights; environmental justice and climate justice; peace and nuclear disarmament; inequality; and the future of work.
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis and evaluated by the WPS interdisciplinary editorial committee, which includes graduate and professional students from across the University of Texas. The WPS committee provides comments and feedback to authors before the paper is published online. Publication in the WPS does not preclude future publication elsewhere; in fact, many of our working papers have since been published in academic journals and edited volumes.
Each year, the WPS publishes the winning paper from the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights and the Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice.
Our Latest Posts:
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Literature as Legal History: Understanding the Colonial Roots of the Nigerian Police Force
By Ọláolúwa Òní View/download paper Abstract: On the 21st of October 2020, the world woke to images and video clips of the bloodied, broken bodies of Nigerians shared across social and traditional media. The night before, young Nigerians protesting police brutality were met with a government-sanctioned, combined police and military onslaught; Nigeria’s decades-long struggle with police
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The Perplexities of the Rights of Nature
by Lindsay Stern View/download paper Abstract: This paper examines the potential implications of Hannah Arendt’s critique of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) for contemporary environmental rights discourse. Reflecting first on canonical, but refreshingly strange early modern European formulations of “personhood,” the paper suggests that advocacy projects on behalf of nonhuman animals and environments court
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Prisoner of the Book: The Living Constitution and Borges’ Book of Sand
This post is one of our Working Papers, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice .by Ana Van Liedekerke View/download paper Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2023) Abstract: This paper uses Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Book of Sand (1975) to examine the aversion of Constitutional originalists in the United States to the idea of the Constitution as a living text. Contrasting Justice Antonin Scalia’s rhetoric
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Reimagining Antisubordination from the Global South: Towards a Joint Venture Theory of Legal Interpretation
This post is one of our Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in Gender and Human Rights, Working Papers .by Taís Penteado View/download paper Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2023) Abstract: The present article is dedicated to showing how subordination is multifaceted and, as such, how legal decisions based on the antisubordination principle should be attentive to the diverse ways in which inequalities can permeate the law, in order to
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A discriminatory education policy that further excludes the oppressed from academia: the case of the National Overseas Scholarship (NOS) for SC-ST scholars in India
by Ashok Danavath View/download paper Abstract The National Overseas Scholarship (NOS) for Scheduled Caste and Tribes (SC-ST) scholars was constituted decades ago as an educational policy by the Government of India (GoI) (Thorat, 2009). With the objective of facilitating upward mobility by guaranteeing financial assistance to low-income students from Dalit and Adivasi communities, this policy
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Rapoport Center’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Workshop
Interview with Autumn Reyes The Rapoport Center opened a call for papers for graduate students across campus to submit papers relevant towards human rights, in hopes of generating discussion with both fellow graduate students and faculty within UT. This workshop operated in a way that utilized a method developed by theInstitute for Global Law and
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Plain Reading the Constitution: Frederick Douglass, Textualism, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice
This post is one of our Working Papers, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice .by Emma Brush View/download paper Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2022) Abstract: In the legal imagination, Frederick Douglass is often viewed as a “constitutional utopian” for his efforts to salvage the prewar Constitution with an antislavery construction. Rejecting the views of both the Taney Court and the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, who
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The Unhappy Marriage of ‘Queerness’ and ‘Culture’: The Present Implications of Fixating on the Past
This post is one of our Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in Gender and Human Rights, Working Papers .by Arti Gupta View/download paper View the edited version, now published in Vol. 48(2) of the Australian Feminist Law Journal. Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2022) Abstract: In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India in Navtej Johar v. Union of India, decriminalised consensual same-sex sexual activities by reading down Section 377
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A Clean Slate for No One: The Need for Automatic Expungement Policies
by Michael Hiestand View/Download Paper Abstract In the United States, the “collateral consequences” of a criminal record extend far beyond the period of physical detention. These disadvantages fall disproportionately on the shoulders of people of color, and on Black Americans in particular. Among the numerous policy mechanisms aimed at alleviating these collateral consequences, expungement –
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Precarity Capitalism and the Global Value Chain in Beef: The Plight of Meatpacking Workers at JBS Greeley
by John Fossum View/Download Paper Abstract Of the many jobs categorized as “essential” during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the continued operation of American meatpacking plants stood out. This work was 1) unrelated to critical healthcare services, 2) primarily staffed by minority and immigrant workers, and 3) conducted in conditions that seemed ideal
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