Rights as Footprints: A New Metaphor for Contemporary Human Rights Practice

Abstract : Metaphors can help advocates and scholars to understand the complicated practice of claiming human rights. So far, drawing on studies from related literatures - from critical rights scholarship, critical race theory and the socio-legal study of public interest lawyering - metaphors have helped to describe and celebrate human rights advocacy. They have also provided a trenchant critique. The "rights as myths" metaphor endures for its shorthand description of how rights beguile socially disadvantaged groups with the false promise of a legal remedy for their grievances, if only they articulate them as rights (...).