This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 7, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The legal ideas fed to law students today are the arguments you'll be hearing a few years later in court.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says the kinds of human rights arguments

being applied to Obama administration agenda items, have a long and troubling history.

Human rights is a concept that has been changing very rapidly in the last couple of decades.

And if you had asked people not too long ago what are human rights

you would have gotten a list of the right not to be thrown in prison for your political beliefs,

the right to free speech,, the right to free religion.

These are the sorts of things that by and large made it into early declarations of human rights

such as the one promulgated not long after the founding of the United Nations.

And the fascinating, in many ways disturbing, newer trend is for human rights to begin changing new things to be packed into it and perhaps old things

taken out of it at the same time.

And in the book that I have coming out this winter schools for Miss Rule, which is about law schools and bad trends in the law schools, I point out that by many accounts the fastest growing area of new projects in law schools, new

scholarship, new journals, new interest is international human rights and at first

that sounds kind of good.

Finally someone is taking an interest in what's happening to dissidents overseas or what's happening to the sad state of political liberty.

Unfortunately, that is not much of what's going on.

What's going on is that the law school thinkers have been throwing themselves

enthusiastically into this process of redefinition in which things that might

be politically desirable or might not, we can argue about that, are redefined as things demanded by international human rights,

which leads to, at a minimum, a new kind of moral suasion.

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