It is appropriate at the outset to pay warm tribute to Whitney Harris who played a key role in establishing the initiative on a Convention for Crimes Against Humanity. Whitney was one of the leading prosecutors at Nuremberg and worked closely with U.S. Chief Prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson. It was my distinct privilege to have met Whitney in Nuremberg and hear him deliver the opening address in 1995 at a seminar to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials against the major Nazi leaders. His voice resonated in the very courtroom where that trial was held, as the immortal words of Justice Robert Jackson took on a new and urgent meaning.

The Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University in St. Louis functions as a center for instruction and research in international and comparative law. It is the home of the project. Those of us involved with the project rejoiced in having the support and advice of Whitney and we are sad that he passed away before the completion of the project. We console ourselves with the knowledge of how much a Convention on Crimes Against Humanity meant to him and how much satisfaction he received from it.

I believe it is important for governments and international institutions, including the World Bank, to encourage research into social and economic rights in developing countries, and I welcome this excellent work on the topic. The enforcement of these rights represents a new and controversial area of judicial intervention. Social and economic rights fall into that category of rights, often referred to as second-generation rights, that also includes cultural and developmental rights. They are distinguished from first-generation rights, which consist of political and civil rights such as equality and the freedom of speech and of assembly.

Second-generation rights were recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and given effect in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which became effective in 1976. However, until comparatively recently, these rights were not taken seriously and were subordinated to civil and political rights. Few states took steps to entrench such rights constitutionally or to adopt legislation or administrative provisions to make such rights enforceable.

A common objection to giving courts jurisdiction over second-generation rights is that judges are ill equipped to adjudicate on the manner in which the legislative and executive branches of government determine how the national budget should be allocated. In countries like the United States of America, there is an additional objection – traditionally only negative rights are enforceable and the courts are regarded as not having jurisdiction to adjudicate positive rights.

Transitional justice has become a feature of the past three decades. It is a consequence of the significant number of nations that have struggled to make the transition from war to peace or from oppression and discrimination to forms of democratic government. The challenge facing such societies is the manner in which they should treat past serious human rights violations. The perpetrators seek blanket amnesties and the victims seek prosecution of the former leaders.

It is tempting in that context to forget the past in favor of building a new and better future. It is the line of least resistance. It is also a recipe for future disaster. Where past human rights violations are ignored and the victims forgotten, there is a cancer in such a society that remains dormant and available for use or abuse by some or other future despotic, nationalistic leader. Examples are there for the choosing – the Balkans, Rwanda, the Middle East.

More enlightened leaders have sought a third way between national amnesia and criminal prosecutions – the establishment of a truth commission. In chapter 1 of this work there is an excellent and concise history of truth commissions and an explanation of their relationship to courts and other forms of official and nonofficial truth-seeking mechanisms.

One of the challenges facing a truth commission is the fairness of its proceedings. It is all too easy to allow it to be used as a political platform to castigate the former regime.

Consider two individuals, John and Mary, who each possess a number of concepts. How can we determine that John and Mary both have a concept of, say, Horse? John and Mary may not have exactly the same knowledge of horses, but it is important to be able to place their horse concepts into correspondence with one another, if only so that we can say things like, “Mary's concept of horse is much more sophisticated than John's.” Concepts should be public in the sense that they can be possessed by more than one person (Fodor, 1998; Fodor & Lepore, 1992), and for this to be the possible, we must be able to determine correspondences, or translations, between two individuals' concepts.

There have been two major approaches in cognitive science to conceptual meaning that could potentially provide a solution to finding translations between conceptual systems. According to an “external grounding” account, concepts' meanings depend on their connection to the external world (this account is more thoroughly defined in the next section). By this account, the concept Horse means what it does because our perceptual apparatus can identify features that characterize horses. According to what we will call a “Conceptual web” account, concepts' meanings depend on their connections to each other. By this account, Horse's meaning depends on Gallop, Domesticated, and Quadruped, and in turn, these concepts depend on other concepts, including Horse (Quine & Ullian, 1970).

Leadership is one of the most extensively researched topics in psychology and organization studies (Rosenbach and Taylor 1993; Sashkin and Lassey 1983). A focus on leadership as the wellspring of political action is found in Carlyle (1849), Freud (1965), Lasswell (1948), and Weber (1954), among many others. Despite this vast outpouring of scholarship, most research has focused on explaining leadership itself, rather than on its effects. That is, the bulk of scholarship is devoted to describing what kind of person (in terms of background or personal characteristics) becomes a leader (Mazlish 1976; Rejai and Phillips 1979), the various types of leadership (Sashkin and Rosenbach 1993; Weber 1954), the situations in which leadership emerges (Burns 1978), the relations between leaders and followers (Fiedler 1967), and the detailed lives or psychohistories of individual leaders (Erikson 1962; 1969; Wolfenstein 1967). Surprisingly little scholarship, particularly in regard to social movements and revolutions, has sought to determine the effect that variation in leadership dynamics – that is, in the relationships among revolutionary leaders, or between leaders and followers – have on the course and outcomes of contentious politics.

There are three main perspectives on the effect of leadership dynamics on movement dynamics in the classic sociological literature: the circulation of elites (Pareto), the tendency to oligarchy of elites (Michels), and the need to rationalize or institutionalize charismatic leadership (Weber). All are surprisingly negative in assessing the potential for revolutionary leadership to make a significant difference.