MICHAEL L. PERLIN, New York Law School
Email: mperlin@nyls.edu
EVA SZELI, Arizona State University - Department of Psychology, New York Law School
Email: eszeli@asu.edu

In this chapter, we will consider the question of how mental health law and human rights law first "met," and then will move on to the challenges facing those who seek to extend international rights protections to persons with mental disabilities. Our thesis is this: the issue of the human rights of people with disabilities had been ignored for decades by the international agencies vested with the protection of human rights on a global scale. A cluster of recent developments - political, legal, social and cultural - have altered the contours of the "playing field" in a such a way as to, finally, help create an environment that is potentially hospitable to a movement that "extends" (the quotation marks are intentionally provocative) human rights to this population. But these rights are often ignored, and other times granted only on paper. We contend that the cause of this is sanism: an irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry, that infects both our jurisprudence and our lawyering practices, that is largely invisible and largely socially acceptable, and that is based predominantly upon stereotype, myth, superstition, and deindividualization, is sustained and perpetuated by our use of alleged "ordinary common sense" (OCS) and heuristic reasoning in an unconscious response to events both in everyday life and in the legal process.

These developments are extraordinarily recent: within the legal literature, it appears that the first time disability rights was conceptualized as a human rights issue was as recently as 1993. For people with mental disabilities, in particular, the development of human rights protections may be even more significant than for people with other disabilities. Like people with other disabilities, people with mental disabilities face degradation, stigmatization, and discrimination throughout the world today. But unlike people with other disabilities, many people with mental disabilities are routinely confined, against their will, in institutions, and deprived of their freedom, dignity, and basic human rights. The challenge we face is to give life to international human rights for this population.

In our chapter, we will present a brief overview of the origins and history of mental disability law, tracing the origins of a civil-rights-protective, legal approach to this "health" issue. We will consider the "missing link" between international human rights law and mental disability law, focusing on the reluctance of mainstream human rights groups to take on the rights of persons with mental disabilities (especially those institutionalized) as a human rights issue. Next, we will trace the "discovery" and the acknowledgment of this "missing link," by examining important reports and UN documents, and the early work of important non-governmental organizations, especially Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI).

We will then consider subsequent developments and accomplishments in this field, including:
* the work of international and local advocacy organizations,
* the impact of publicity and media coverage of human rights abuses in this arena,
* the work of a handful of heroic lawyers and judges in this area of the law,
* the relevant caselaw from regional human rights bodies, and
* the development of recent important international and domestic legislation and policy, especially the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

We will next consider the challenges that need be addressed in the 21st century, including the thorny issue of limited resources, the need for the creation of meaningful deinstitutionalization and community integration programs, and the absence (or lack of enforcement of) rights-protective mental health legislation. Along with this, we will consider what we term the "universal factors" that appear to corrupt mental disability law in virtually every nation in the world. Finally, we will focus on the pernicious and corrosive power of sanism, which arguably underlies every major challenge faced in this field, and we will conclude that, only by confronting and dealing with sanism's omnipresence, will be have any meaningful chance of redeeming this issue of law and policy.

DAVID KINLEY, University of Sydney - Faculty of Law
Email: D.Kinley@usyd.edu.au
TOM DAVIS, University of Melbourne - Department of Political Science
Email: tdavis@unimelb.edu.au

The World Bank is no stranger to criticism of its projects, especially in respect of its privatization and private sector development projects. Critics point to the environmental, social and cultural damage that certain projects have caused, which for some appears not just to be a product of the individual projects themselves, but symptomatic of a broader policy failure within the Bank to engage with the social consequences of its actions. In fact, and somewhat surprisingly, both the Bank's critics and its defenders seldom employ human rights language in their reasoning and rhetoric, and where they do, it is only fleetingly and often lacking in any real substance. This is surprising because of so much of what the Bank does can be, and is, supportive of the objects of international human rights standards, especially in respect of economic, social and cultural rights. It is a central theme of this Discussion Paper that for the Bank to embrace this fact alone would be a very significant step towards it being better able not only to respond to its critics, but also, crucially, to deliver upon its own objectives as most recently expressed in the Millennium Development Goals.

This Discussion Paper was commissioned by the World Bank. The brief was to provide an account of the major criticisms directed at the World Bank's private sector-oriented projects, and to determine what, if any, consequences for the protection of human rights are revealed by those criticisms. The approach adopted in this paper is first to identify key criticisms through empirical research and then to subject them to human rights analysis. This provides the basis for a clear account of the legal and programmatic implications for the Bank, today and in the future, of those human rights obligations and duties raised, directly or indirectly, by the critics of the Bank.

AARON HALEGUA, Harvard University - Harvard Law School
Email: aaron.halegua@gmail.com

Many of China's 150 million migrant workers travel from their rural homes to labor in the cities each year only to have their wages withheld by their employer. This phenomenon has led to riots, protests and violence by frustrated migrants. Therefore, finding a better means for resolving these wage disputes is crucial to preserving China's social stability. This article examines the various paths that migrants can take to get this money back. It argues that despite government attention to this problem, the formal dispute resolution system of arbitration and court tribunals has failed these workers because it is both inaccessible to them and ineffective at resolving their disputes. Instead, informal mediation is a far more suitable and effective means of inducing employers to pay the wages owed to the workers. Moreover, a case study of the organization Little Bird reveals how NGOs may be more successful at mediating these disputes than are government officials. This article is based on over two years of fieldwork in China, which includes countless interviews of the actors involved in the labor dispute resolution system, a review of internal government reports, Chinese laws and regulations, media reports, official handbooks and scholarly articles, as well as the observation of several labor arbitrations and mediations. In concluding, the article considers the options for reforming the China's labor dispute resolution system, the significance of the 2007 Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law, and the implications of this paper's findings on the rule of law and social stability in China.

MICHAEL L. PERLIN, New York Law School
Email: mperlin@nyls.edu

This article is a commentary on Michael Ashley Stein & Janet Lord, Jacobus tenBroek, Participatory Justice, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, - Tex. J. Civ Lib. & Civ. Rts. - (2008) (in press). In it, I seek to expand their analysis of the new UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in an effort to invigorate an area of institutionalized patients rights law that is now nearly forgotten: the rights of such persons to exercise civil rights while institutionalized. I also argue that Prof. Stein and Ms. Lord's paper should lead us to focus also on the issues of attitudes, and how authentic amelioration and law reform in this area is impossible unless and until we begin to consider how negative and stereotypical attitudes towards persons with mental disabilities are formed and perpetuated. I conclude that the demand for participatory justice for persons with disabilities cannot be satisfied unless and until we turn our attention to attitudinal issues.

ERIC C. CHRISTIANSEN, Golden Gate University School of Law
Email: echristiansen@ggu.edu

One of the most distinctive elements of the South African Constitutional Court's jurisprudence has been its willingness to adjudicate socio-economic rights in addition to traditional civil and political rights. However, in its process of formulating a domestic jurisprudence of social rights enforcement, the South African Court had little guidance. Most academic commentators opposed the enforcement of social rights by the judiciary. Hence, the Court's task at least implicitly involved a review and evaluation of the reasonableness and applicability of those traditional critiques. The result in South Africa was an affirmative jurisprudence that internalized jurisprudential limits that correspond to those justiciability critiques not otherwise addressed by the Constitutional text or other unique elements of the South African milieu. This process for development of an adapted, affirmative jurisprudence of socio-economic rights enforceability is a novel and potentially fruitful contribution to comparative constitutionalism. The resulting caselaw may be of some value to other nations as a guidepost and model, but it is the process of differentiated incorporation by which the Court formulated its internalized limits that is clearly exportable to and adaptable by other countries desiring judicial enforcement socio-economic rights.

JAYANTH K. KRISHNAN, William Mitchell College of Law
Email: jkrishnan@wmitchell.edu
STEWART MACAULAY, University of Wisconsin Law School
Email: Smacaula@wisc.edu

To say that Professor Marc Galanter's scholarship is diverse would be a woeful understatement. In his over forty years of writing, Galanter's work has covered topics including (but not limited to) torts, contracts, constitutional law, comparative law, empirical legal studies, the legal profession, legal anthropology, and South Asian studies. With Galanter's scholarship so heavily cited and respected, we see it as only fitting, particularly upon his recently turning seventy-five, to acknowledge his achievements in a symposium that reflects back on the years of his work.

Serving as special editors to an issue forthcoming in the Duke Law School journal, Law and Contemporary Problems, we offer here a short essay that briefly summarizes the various works of the contributors participating in this dedication. Our authors provide a set of papers that cover a range of disciplines: law, sociology, political science, anthropology, history, and philosophy. The works embody Galanter's long-held belief that not only should law be studied in an interdisciplinary manner but that it can be instrumentally used by both elites and grassroots activists to effectuate social change.

The symposium-contributors also share another connection. Each views her or himself to be a student of Galanter's. Some of these students have been directly mentored by Galanter while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and have since gone on to academic posts at other institutions. Others are more distance-students who have been influenced either while studying elsewhere or while working as academics at different universities. The common link though is that this cohort is part of the next generation of Galanter-influenced scholars who will be carrying-on the lessons of Galanter's vast scholarship for decades to come.