Many Americans believe that the United States has a tradition of federal constitutional protection for fundamental human rights, dating back to adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791. That belief is mostly wrong. For most of U.S. history, protection for fundamental rights depended primarily on...

International courts (ICs) with human rights mandates have recently faced instances of backlash, aiming to curb their authority. But human rights ICs continue to function with their competences largely intact. A crucial source of IC resilience is embeddedness in domestic institutions and actors....

Modern rule of law and post-war constitutionalism are both anchored in rights-based limitations on state authority. Rule-of-law norms and principles, at both domestic and international levels, are designed to protect the freedom and dignity of the person. Given this “thick” conception of the...

Much of the data underlying global poverty and inequality estimates is not in the public domain, but can be accessed in small pieces using the World Bank's PovcalNet online tool. To overcome these limitations and reproduce this database in a format more useful to researchers, we ran...