When Ambivalent Principles Prevail. Leads for Explaining Western Legal Orders’ Infatuation with the Human Dignity Principle

Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez

No 37, EUI-LAW Working Papers from European University Institute (EUI), Department of Law

Abstract: This paper originates in the statement of the human dignity principle’s (HDP) growing importance in many legal orders. It first examines whether many legal orders’ interest for the HDP may be linked to its intrinsic (symbolic/axiological) or extrinsic (usefulness in terms of litigation) qualities. Since the conclusions of this examination do not prove totally convincing –or at least not to the degree that one would expect for such a foundational principle as the HDP-, the argument looks in another direction: that of scholarly promotion. Indeed, a research conducted on French material provides with firm bases for suggesting that one of the striving forces of the recent legal infatuation with the HDP has to do with the fact that it has been seized by critical trends of legal scholarship as a favorable occasion for promoting the resurgence of theoretically naturalist representations of law.

Keywords: fundamental/human; rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-12-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/1814/7664 Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:euilaw:p0096

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EUI-LAW Working Papers from European University Institute (EUI), Department of Law
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Machteld Nijsten ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).