Abstract

Having inherited the language of inalienable human rights from a cultural world we no longer inhabit, the justice community must attend with care to major changes in the social framework within which it continues to invoke such notions. Two contemporary paradigm shifts make plain the challenges involved in relying on the conceptual currency of modernity to address a postmodern world: (1) the changing view of sexual identity highlights the hazards as well as the freedoms involved in the right to self-determination and (2) the shift of the threats associated with oppressive power from the nation-state to economic institutions not only calls into question the efficacy of addressing rights claims to the political state but also, coupled with a communicative environment of pervasive simulation, opens the way for questioning the very possibility of framing rights claims at all.