Malcolm Langford
Biographic Data
| ID | 3590645 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Malcolm Langford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Malcolm |
| FAMILY NAME | Langford |
| SIGNATURE | LANGFORD M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5975-4320 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
An Unlikely Rights Revolution: Legal Mobilization in Scandinavia Since the 1970s
Why have civil society groups in Scandinavia increasingly turned to legal mobilization in recent decades? In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, a legal-political culture based on parliamentary supremacy, deferential judiciaries, strong-state corporatism, and jurisprudential scepticism towards rights talk supposedly discourages groups in civil society from seeking societal change through litigation. Yet, in all three countries, diverse groups and organi…
Bargaining in the Shadow of Awards
International investment disputes occupy a curious place in the research programme on compliance. On the one hand, there is a widespread presumption that respondent states generally pay the compensation that they are ordered to pay because not doing so risks more litigation or less investment. On the other hand, these disputes frequently continue long after awards are handed down, there are visible instances of non-payment and there is little evi…
Democracy and public goods revisited: Local institutions, development, and access to water
Democracies are commonly thought to provide greater levels of public goods than autocracies. Given that many public goods are provided locally, higher levels of local democracy are further thought to result in better rates of provision in both autocratic and democratic systems. However, several studies have cast doubt on democratic superiority in public goods provision both nationally and locally. We re-examine these contested relationships, inve…
The Rise of Electoral Management Bodies: Diffusion and Effects
Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) are commonly established to increase electoral legitimacy by designing, implementing and/or enforcing rules surrounding nominations, polling, voting, and tabulation. Globally however, EMB design, governance, and efficacy vary considerably. Utilizing four EMB data sources, this article asks (1) to what extent do EMBs form a new pillar of constitutional governance; and (2) how effective are they in managing and in…
Teachers’ agency and online education in times of crisis
This study examines academic teachers' agency and emergency responses, prompted by the physical closure of universities and university colleges due to the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic-related lockdown accelerated the digitalization of education and forced teachers to adjust their teaching. A theoretical model is elucidated, in which teachers' agency is understood as the willingness to engage in iterational, practical-evaluative, projective, and …
Gammelt nytt» om militæraktivisme og fredsaktivisme i nye klær
Hvordan Norge håndterer sin militæraktivisme og fredsaktivisme ble aktualisert i kampanjen for et sete i sikkerhetsrådet. Aktivisme forstås her som nasjonens villighet til å ta initiativ på tross av kostnader. I denne replikken svarer vi på Friis sin kommentar som trekker verdien av vårt bidrag i tvil, da han omtaler vår analyse av Norges unnlatelse av å fremme sin militæraktivisme til fordel for «mykere verdier», som «gammelt nytt.» I kampanjen …
The impact of public interest litigation: The case of socio-economic rights
In the global turn to rights, courts are often reified as central actors in processes of social transformation. In this respect, it is worth recalling the clear-eyed and grounded perspective of Andrea Durbach, who emphasised both the potency and limitation of litigation, as well as the diverse functions of courts. This Festschrift essay assesses the transformative power of socio-economic rights litigation. It begins by setting out the different r…
Taming the Digital Leviathan: Automated Decision-Making and International Human Rights
Enthusiasm abounds about the potential of artificial intelligence to automate public decision-making. The rise of machine learning and computational text analysis together with the proliferation of digital platforms has raised the prospect of “robo-judging” and “robo-administrators.” From a human rights perspective, the reaction has been mixed, and on balance negative. Optimists herald the possibilities of democratizing legal services and making …
Ground-Breaking? An Empirical Assessment of the Draft Business and Human Rights Treaty
In this essay, we examine empirically whether the revised draft of the business and human rights (BHR) treaty is a normative advance on the existing jungle of global instruments. Since the 1970s, almost one hundred global corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards have been adopted, half of them addressing human rights. See Figure 1 from our global CSR database, below. What is novel about the current treaty-drafting process within the UN Hum…
Militæraktivisme brandet som fredsaktivisme? Norges kampanje for en plass i FNs sikkerhetsråd
Hvordan håndterer Norge sin militæraktivisme og sitt NATO-medlemskap når landet vil presentere seg selv som en fredsnasjon? Problemstillingen ble aktuell i det norske utenriksdepartementets nylige kampanje for å få Norge valgt inn i FNs sikkerhetsråd, hvor ideen om Norge som fredsnasjon stod sentralt. I denne artikkelen bruker vi nasjonsbranding som et analytisk rammeverk for å forstå hvordan Norge bygget opp sin kampanje som fredsnasjon og håndt…
Children’s Rights in Norway: An Implementation Paradox
The UN Convention for the Rights of the Child (CRC) has emerged as a central yardstick in assessing policies and practices concerning children. Norway has incorporated the convention in domestic law and performs exceptionally well in global indexes on children's rights. However, the level of compliance and implementation by Norway with the CRC has attracted criticism and many questions can be raised about these global indexes. This chapter sets o…
The Commitment Curve: Global Regulation of Business and Human Rights
The divide between hard law and soft law approaches to global regulation of corporations in relation to human rights is partly based on empirical assumptions. Taking a step back, we assess the claims concerning the current state of global regulation and political feasibility of hard law approaches. Moving beyond the usual suspects, we map 98 existing standards that regulate corporations and find a great variation in how different sectors treat hu…
Critiques of Human Rights
Empirical critiques of human rights have reached a crescendo. Despite their centrality in late modernity, human rights face claims of irrelevance and predictions of demise. These social science–inflected assessments follow a familiar repertoire of critique. Concerns surrounding sociological legitimacy, material effectiveness, and distributive equality are foregrounded and undergirded by a growing body of empirical evidence, especially in sociolog…
Managing Backlash: The Evolving Investment Treaty Arbitrator
Have investment treaty arbitrators responded to the so-called ‘legitimacy crisis’ that has beleaguered the international investment regime in the past decade? There are strong rational choice and discursive-based reasons for thinking that these adjudicators would be responsive to the prevailing ‘stakeholder mood’. However, a competing set of legalistic and attitudinal factors may prevent arbitrators from bending towards the arc of enhanced sociol…
The View from Elsewhere: Scandinavian Penal Practices and International Critique
International organs review rights performance regularly and while one may dispute their objectivity, their access to relevant information has risen significantly in recent years. Through this material, we have engaged in a longitudinal, comparative analysis of penal exceptionalism in Scandinavia. We contrast in particular the findings of the Committee against Torture (CAT) for Norway, Sweden and Denmark against four Western European states (Belg…
La lucha por los derechos sociales: Los fallos judiciales y la disputa política por su cumplimiento
Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance: Making it Stick
The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of judgments on social rights around the world. However, we know little about whether these rulings have been implemented. Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance is the first book to engage in a comparative study of compliance of social rights judgments as well as their broader effects. Covering fourteen different domestic and international jurisdictions and drawing on multiple disc…
Lost in Transformation? The Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals
On September 25, 2015, the world's leaders adopted a new suite of development goals—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—that are to guide policymakers for the next decade and a half. On first inspection, the declaration is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Constituted by a list of 17 goals and 169 targets, it is arguably the most comprehensive global agenda adopted since the UN Charter in 1945. Its thematic repertoire ranges from pover…
Rights, Development and Critical Modernity
The march of rights into international development offers, on the face of it, a more progressive and transformational paradigm. Contemporary rights expressions are more expansive and diverse than their nineteenth-century forebears. Inevitably though, rights-based approaches have been criticized, with claims that rights have contributed to a minimization and individualization of distributive justice and participatory democracy or even been appropr…
Muddying the Water? Assessing Target-based Approaches in Development Cooperation for Water and Sanitation
In the debate on the post-2015 development agenda, a clear preference exists for simple and quantifiable targets. The water sector provides a useful perspective in which to evaluate the use of this strategy because it has been subject to quantitative target setting since 1976. We critically analyze two early periods of target setting together with their most recent incarnation in the Millennium Development Goals. In so doing, we identify two stor…
The Millennium Development Goals and Human Rights: Past, Present and Future
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have generated tremendous discussion in global policy and academic circles. On the one hand, they have been hailed as the most important initiative ever in international development. On the other hand, they have been described as a great betrayal of human rights and universal values that has contributed to a depoliticization of development. With contributions from scholars from the fields of economics, law,…
The Turn to Metrics
Until recently, qualititative methods have been dominant in human rights practice. Nonetheless, the field has not been immune from the global shift towards quantitative measurement and the community of human rights activists, professionals, officials and scholars has begun to explore ways in which different metrics can establish the denial of rights, reveal breaches of obligations and justify new laws or policies. With the advantage of communicat…
Right, Remedy or Rhetoric: Land Restitution in International Law
The New Kid on the Block – A Complaints Procedure for the Convention on the Rights of the Child
Art or Science? Synthesising Lessons from Public Interest Litigation and the Dangers of Legal Determinism
In 2008, one of the largest funders of human rights organisations in South Africa, the Atlantic Philanthropies, published a report that identified several factors for optimal public interest litigation. Despite the relative density of organisations that conduct public interest litigation in South Africa, there has been little critical engagement with its findings. Yet this exercise is pertinent given the growing reliance by South African civil so…
A Poverty of Rights: Six Ways to Fix the MDGs
The reactions of the human rights community to the MDGs have been diverse. The goals have given a clear, communicable and quantitative focus to development but they arguably distract attention from important issues and are structurally flawed. In looking backwards, we need to consider whether the human rights gaps in the MDGs architecture are partly responsible for the mixed success of the enterprise and whether the MDGs are also being used to av…
Critiques of Human Rights
Empirical critiques of human rights have reached a crescendo. Despite their centrality in late modernity, human rights face claims of irrelevance and predictions of demise. These social science–inflected assessments follow a familiar repertoire of critique. Concerns surrounding sociological legitimacy, material effectiveness, and distributive equality are foregrounded and undergirded by a growing body of empirical evidence, especially in sociolog…
Lost in Transformation? The Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals
On September 25, 2015, the world's leaders adopted a new suite of development goals—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—that are to guide policymakers for the next decade and a half. On first inspection, the declaration is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Constituted by a list of 17 goals and 169 targets, it is arguably the most comprehensive global agenda adopted since the UN Charter in 1945. Its thematic repertoire ranges from pover…
Ambition That Overleaps Itself? A Response to Stephen Tully's Critique of the General Comment on the Right to Water
In the March 2005 issue of this journal, Stephen Tully set out to critique General Comment No. 15 on the Right to Water, issued in 2002 by the Committee overseeing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Tully argues that the right to water cannot be implied from the Covenant, that its practical value is limited and, quite paradoxically, that the Committee was not bold enough in imposing direct obligations on multinati…
The Commitment Curve: Global Regulation of Business and Human Rights
The divide between hard law and soft law approaches to global regulation of corporations in relation to human rights is partly based on empirical assumptions. Taking a step back, we assess the claims concerning the current state of global regulation and political feasibility of hard law approaches. Moving beyond the usual suspects, we map 98 existing standards that regulate corporations and find a great variation in how different sectors treat hu…
Managing Backlash: The Evolving Investment Treaty Arbitrator
Have investment treaty arbitrators responded to the so-called ‘legitimacy crisis’ that has beleaguered the international investment regime in the past decade? There are strong rational choice and discursive-based reasons for thinking that these adjudicators would be responsive to the prevailing ‘stakeholder mood’. However, a competing set of legalistic and attitudinal factors may prevent arbitrators from bending towards the arc of enhanced sociol…
The Turn to Metrics
Until recently, qualititative methods have been dominant in human rights practice. Nonetheless, the field has not been immune from the global shift towards quantitative measurement and the community of human rights activists, professionals, officials and scholars has begun to explore ways in which different metrics can establish the denial of rights, reveal breaches of obligations and justify new laws or policies. With the advantage of communicat…
Rights, Development and Critical Modernity
The march of rights into international development offers, on the face of it, a more progressive and transformational paradigm. Contemporary rights expressions are more expansive and diverse than their nineteenth-century forebears. Inevitably though, rights-based approaches have been criticized, with claims that rights have contributed to a minimization and individualization of distributive justice and participatory democracy or even been appropr…
Muddying the Water? Assessing Target-based Approaches in Development Cooperation for Water and Sanitation
In the debate on the post-2015 development agenda, a clear preference exists for simple and quantifiable targets. The water sector provides a useful perspective in which to evaluate the use of this strategy because it has been subject to quantitative target setting since 1976. We critically analyze two early periods of target setting together with their most recent incarnation in the Millennium Development Goals. In so doing, we identify two stor…
An Unlikely Rights Revolution: Legal Mobilization in Scandinavia Since the 1970s
Why have civil society groups in Scandinavia increasingly turned to legal mobilization in recent decades? In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, a legal-political culture based on parliamentary supremacy, deferential judiciaries, strong-state corporatism, and jurisprudential scepticism towards rights talk supposedly discourages groups in civil society from seeking societal change through litigation. Yet, in all three countries, diverse groups and organi…
Democracy and public goods revisited: Local institutions, development, and access to water
Democracies are commonly thought to provide greater levels of public goods than autocracies. Given that many public goods are provided locally, higher levels of local democracy are further thought to result in better rates of provision in both autocratic and democratic systems. However, several studies have cast doubt on democratic superiority in public goods provision both nationally and locally. We re-examine these contested relationships, inve…
Militæraktivisme brandet som fredsaktivisme? Norges kampanje for en plass i FNs sikkerhetsråd
Hvordan håndterer Norge sin militæraktivisme og sitt NATO-medlemskap når landet vil presentere seg selv som en fredsnasjon? Problemstillingen ble aktuell i det norske utenriksdepartementets nylige kampanje for å få Norge valgt inn i FNs sikkerhetsråd, hvor ideen om Norge som fredsnasjon stod sentralt. I denne artikkelen bruker vi nasjonsbranding som et analytisk rammeverk for å forstå hvordan Norge bygget opp sin kampanje som fredsnasjon og håndt…
Right, Remedy or Rhetoric: Land Restitution in International Law
The New Kid on the Block – A Complaints Procedure for the Convention on the Rights of the Child
Art or Science? Synthesising Lessons from Public Interest Litigation and the Dangers of Legal Determinism
In 2008, one of the largest funders of human rights organisations in South Africa, the Atlantic Philanthropies, published a report that identified several factors for optimal public interest litigation. Despite the relative density of organisations that conduct public interest litigation in South Africa, there has been little critical engagement with its findings. Yet this exercise is pertinent given the growing reliance by South African civil so…
Expectation of Plenty: Response to Stephen Tully
Nonsense upon stilts: East Timor and The International Court of Justice
(1996). Nonsense upon stilts?: East Timor and The International Court of Justice. Australian Journal of Human Rights: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 141-151
The Right to Social Security and Implications for Law, Policy and Practice
Expectation of Plenty: Response to Stephen Tully
Ambition That Overleaps Itself? A Response to Stephen Tully's Critique of the General Comment on the Right to Water
In the March 2005 issue of this journal, Stephen Tully set out to critique General Comment No. 15 on the Right to Water, issued in 2002 by the Committee overseeing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Tully argues that the right to water cannot be implied from the Covenant, that its practical value is limited and, quite paradoxically, that the Committee was not bold enough in imposing direct obligations on multinati…
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Past, Present and Future
After the adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ('UDHR'), which included a relatively full catalogue of human rights, the UN General Assembly instructed the Commission on Human Rights to commence the drafting of a single covenant on human rights. While the drafting of a treaty covering civil and political rights was completed in short time, disagreement over whether to include economic, social and cultural rights led the E…
Social Rights Jurisprudence: Emerging Trends in International and Comparative Law
In the space of two decades, social rights have emerged from the shadows and margins of human rights jurisprudence. The authors in this book provide a critical analysis of almost two thousand judgments and decisions from twenty-nine national and international jurisdictions. The breadth of the decisions is vast, from the resettlement of evictees to the regulation of private medical plans to the development of state programs to address poverty and …
Closing the Gap? – An Introduction to the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
Evolution or Revolution? – Extrapolating from the Experience of the Human Rights Committee
Judicialização dos direitos econômicos, sociais e culturais no âmbito nacional: Uma Análise Socio-Jurídica
Do ponto de vista histórico, pode-se considerar notável a importância recentemente adquirida pelos direitos econômicos, sociais e culturais (ESC) na jurisprudência comparada e nas estratégias de litígio. Vislumbra-se hoje um processo, ao mesmo tempo, de ampliação e aprofundamento da exigibilidade destes direitos perante tribunais nacionais, o que, embora antes tenha se restringido a poucas jurisdições, hoje pode ser constatado em diversos países …
A Poverty of Rights: Six Ways to Fix the MDGs
The reactions of the human rights community to the MDGs have been diverse. The goals have given a clear, communicable and quantitative focus to development but they arguably distract attention from important issues and are structurally flawed. In looking backwards, we need to consider whether the human rights gaps in the MDGs architecture are partly responsible for the mixed success of the enterprise and whether the MDGs are also being used to av…
Right, Remedy or Rhetoric: Land Restitution in International Law
The New Kid on the Block – A Complaints Procedure for the Convention on the Rights of the Child
Art or Science? Synthesising Lessons from Public Interest Litigation and the Dangers of Legal Determinism
In 2008, one of the largest funders of human rights organisations in South Africa, the Atlantic Philanthropies, published a report that identified several factors for optimal public interest litigation. Despite the relative density of organisations that conduct public interest litigation in South Africa, there has been little critical engagement with its findings. Yet this exercise is pertinent given the growing reliance by South African civil so…
The Turn to Metrics
Until recently, qualititative methods have been dominant in human rights practice. Nonetheless, the field has not been immune from the global shift towards quantitative measurement and the community of human rights activists, professionals, officials and scholars has begun to explore ways in which different metrics can establish the denial of rights, reveal breaches of obligations and justify new laws or policies. With the advantage of communicat…
The Millennium Development Goals and Human Rights: Past, Present and Future
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have generated tremendous discussion in global policy and academic circles. On the one hand, they have been hailed as the most important initiative ever in international development. On the other hand, they have been described as a great betrayal of human rights and universal values that has contributed to a depoliticization of development. With contributions from scholars from the fields of economics, law,…
Muddying the Water? Assessing Target-based Approaches in Development Cooperation for Water and Sanitation
In the debate on the post-2015 development agenda, a clear preference exists for simple and quantifiable targets. The water sector provides a useful perspective in which to evaluate the use of this strategy because it has been subject to quantitative target setting since 1976. We critically analyze two early periods of target setting together with their most recent incarnation in the Millennium Development Goals. In so doing, we identify two stor…
Rights, Development and Critical Modernity
The march of rights into international development offers, on the face of it, a more progressive and transformational paradigm. Contemporary rights expressions are more expansive and diverse than their nineteenth-century forebears. Inevitably though, rights-based approaches have been criticized, with claims that rights have contributed to a minimization and individualization of distributive justice and participatory democracy or even been appropr…
Lost in Transformation? The Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals
On September 25, 2015, the world's leaders adopted a new suite of development goals—the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—that are to guide policymakers for the next decade and a half. On first inspection, the declaration is breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Constituted by a list of 17 goals and 169 targets, it is arguably the most comprehensive global agenda adopted since the UN Charter in 1945. Its thematic repertoire ranges from pover…
The View from Elsewhere: Scandinavian Penal Practices and International Critique
International organs review rights performance regularly and while one may dispute their objectivity, their access to relevant information has risen significantly in recent years. Through this material, we have engaged in a longitudinal, comparative analysis of penal exceptionalism in Scandinavia. We contrast in particular the findings of the Committee against Torture (CAT) for Norway, Sweden and Denmark against four Western European states (Belg…
La lucha por los derechos sociales: Los fallos judiciales y la disputa política por su cumplimiento
Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance: Making it Stick
The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of judgments on social rights around the world. However, we know little about whether these rulings have been implemented. Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance is the first book to engage in a comparative study of compliance of social rights judgments as well as their broader effects. Covering fourteen different domestic and international jurisdictions and drawing on multiple disc…
The Commitment Curve: Global Regulation of Business and Human Rights
The divide between hard law and soft law approaches to global regulation of corporations in relation to human rights is partly based on empirical assumptions. Taking a step back, we assess the claims concerning the current state of global regulation and political feasibility of hard law approaches. Moving beyond the usual suspects, we map 98 existing standards that regulate corporations and find a great variation in how different sectors treat hu…
Critiques of Human Rights
Empirical critiques of human rights have reached a crescendo. Despite their centrality in late modernity, human rights face claims of irrelevance and predictions of demise. These social science–inflected assessments follow a familiar repertoire of critique. Concerns surrounding sociological legitimacy, material effectiveness, and distributive equality are foregrounded and undergirded by a growing body of empirical evidence, especially in sociolog…
Managing Backlash: The Evolving Investment Treaty Arbitrator
Have investment treaty arbitrators responded to the so-called ‘legitimacy crisis’ that has beleaguered the international investment regime in the past decade? There are strong rational choice and discursive-based reasons for thinking that these adjudicators would be responsive to the prevailing ‘stakeholder mood’. However, a competing set of legalistic and attitudinal factors may prevent arbitrators from bending towards the arc of enhanced sociol…
Children’s Rights in Norway: An Implementation Paradox
The UN Convention for the Rights of the Child (CRC) has emerged as a central yardstick in assessing policies and practices concerning children. Norway has incorporated the convention in domestic law and performs exceptionally well in global indexes on children's rights. However, the level of compliance and implementation by Norway with the CRC has attracted criticism and many questions can be raised about these global indexes. This chapter sets o…
Political science (34 works) · Law (24 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Human rights (19 works) · Law and economics (18 works) · Human Rights and Development (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Economics (10 works) · Epistemology (7 works)