Book Discussion: Human Dignity in Asia: Dialogue between Law and Culture (Cambridge University Press 2022)

Using interdisciplinary methods, this book is a pioneering exploration of Asian understandings of human dignity and human rights. It encompasses rigorous scrutiny of dignity jurisprudence in major Asian apex courts, detailed philosophical analysis of dignity in religious traditions, and contextualized socio-political analysis of religious dignity discourse in several Asian societies. This is an innovative systematic survey of how human dignity is understood in Asia, demonstrating how those understandings converge and diverge with other parts of the world. Synthesising legal, philosophical, and sociological expertise, this volume furthers the dialogue between Asia and the West, and advances debates on whether human rights are universal or particular to any one region. As many of the world's liberal democracies are challenged by polarization and populism, this comparative study of human dignity broadens our horizons and offers a potential alternative to a rigidified social imagination.

Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu was the ASLI Visiting Fellow at National University of Singapore in 2016 and Visiting Scholar of Harvard-Yenching Institute for 2016-2017. He serves on the board of Taiwan Association for Philosophy of Law and Association for Asian Constitutional Studies. His research interests include legal philosophy, comparative constitutional law, transitional justice, and civil disobedience.

Etin Anwar teaches Islam, environmental apocalypse, and comparative ethics. She is the author of A Genealogy of Islamic Feminism: Pattern and Change in Indonesia (Routledge, 2018) and Gender and Self in Islam (Routledge, 2006). She has published several articles on Ibn Sina, Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabi, anti-Americanism, and women’s movements in Indonesia in various journals including Islamic Studies, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and Hawwa.

Nick Barber joined the Oxford Law Faculty in 1998 as a Fixed Term Fellow at Brasenose, moving to a tenured Fellowship at Trinity College in 2000.  He holds an MA from Oxford and the BCL, and is a non-practicing barrister and member of Middle Temple.  In 2013 he was appointed University Lecturer in Constitutional Law and in 2017 he was appointed Professor of Constitutional Law and Theory.  In 2012 and 2013 he was a visiting Professor at Renmin University, China.  He has lectured extensively on constitutional law and theory in many countries.  He has published many papers in these areas, and his book - The Constitutional State – was published in 2011, and has been widely reviewed.  His second book, The Principles of Constitutionalism, was published by Oxford University Press in summer 2018.  His most recent book, The United Kingdom Constitution: An Introduction was published in the Clarendon Law Series in late 2021.  Both The American Journal of Jurisprudence and The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies have published collections of essays on his work.  

He was founder editor of the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Blog, and he was a co-author, with Jeff King and Tom Hickman, of the blog post that sparked the litigation in Miller, a post which first advanced the arguments eventually adopted by the High Court and Supreme Court.  

Alongside Richard Ekins, he is co-director of The Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government.   

He is currently Associate Dean (Research).