The Project is unique in its attention to human rights and the institutions of human intimacy such as the family. The project goals are to train current and future faculty, produce innovative comparative educational materials, and infuse scholarly and policy analyses of family and sexuality with emerging human rights concepts. The Project will include study of the legal systems of the United States , Canada , and Northern Ireland . These three societies were chosen because they are at very different historical moments in their evolution in regard to both human rights jurisprudence and tolerance of a plurality of family forms. While there is a rich Constitutional discourse of rights in the United States, there is little explicit engagement with international human rights norms.
Human rights is a subject relegated to a separate course.
By contrast, the provisions of international human rights documents and the concepts they contain are typically absent from core law school course discussions. Instead, constitutional rights discourse, which is focused on the idea of mere formal equality for the individual as a legal subject, is emphasized. As it confronts issues of resource allocation and social policy governing families and other sites of intimacy, the United States has much to learn from the international human rights perspective so influential in Northern Ireland and Canada. The equality provisions in the Canadian Charter were developed in consultation with and strengthened by the input of interest groups, including women's groups. This type of critical analysis could greatly inform the developments in Northern Ireland.