Thinking Human Rights Through Metaphor

Abstract

The present article argues that as legal scholars we need to attend to the many ways in which human rights are represented in metaphor because metaphor is jurisgenerative (ie metaphor is not simply a rhetorical or persuasive device but a juridical means of creating legal meaning and concepts). The article argues that metaphors constitute particular understandings of human rights and that these understandings come with political, legal, ethical, and affective consequences for legal thought and practice. The article pursues this argument through a reading and re-reading of three quite well-known metaphors: the metaphor of the trump card; the metaphor of the lingua franca; and, finally, the metaphor of the empty vessel.