Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence — With Karen Engle

On September 15, 2025, Professor Karen Engle (Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law, Texas Law; Co-director, Rapoport Center) presented her newest book, Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2025), to an audience of faculty, staff, and students from across campus. The book uses prison and police abolitionist thought to challenge the obligations that international human rights law increasingly imposes on states to heighten their criminalization of certain human rights violations, including gendered, racialized, and homophobic violence. In doing so, she explained, human rights courts place “the safety of subordinated groups in the hands of the very criminal legal system that is a major perpetrator of violence against those groups.” Focusing on the European Court of Human Rights, Engle called on the Court to take an abolitionist turn based on the history of abolitionist thought in the region and some of the Court’s own jurisprudence embodying penal minimalism.

In her response to the talk, Professor Rachel Rebouché (G. Rollie White Teaching Excellence Chair in Law, Texas Law) lauded Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court and Engle’s pathbreaking scholarship, applying it in part to the United States. “The very premise of Professor Engle’s book, and indeed, her broader work is exactly what is needed at this moment,” she emphasized. “There is too much to lose by failing to rethink our approach to rights.”

Congratulations to Professor Engle on her new publication!