Author: Andrea Pin

The concept of human dignity has become a staple in legal studies, political philosophy, and political and moral theology. It is now a powerful term in constitutional and statutory texts, judicial decisions, academic scholarship, and even political rhetoric. It serves several roles: it may galvanize political and legal sensitiveness to a certain topic or agenda,1 express the importance of human rights or the gravest concern for their violation, capture the quintessence of a legal system,2 flesh out a metatheory of how legal systems should operate, and guide interpretation of legal rules.3

The centrality of human dignity in contemporary academic, political, and judicial discourse is hardly surprising. More than a half century ago, Lon Fuller startled the legal academy by arguing that human dignity is so central to justice that he considered every deviation from the rule of law to be an affront to the dignity of the person as a responsible agent.4 This is now a common position,5 and human dignity has certainly become a key component of what David Law has called ‘generic constitutional law’.6 If, as Law argues, a toolkit of concepts, rights, principles, and devices is traded across countries, dignity is clearly part of this toolkit. Actually, dignity seems to be more than just one of the several components of a vast toolkit—it often embodies the quest for the universal in human rights adjudication and has become a yardstick to measure the progress of legal civilization.7