Human Rights: A Tide in the Affairs of Men

Excerpts from the John A. Sibley Lecture delivered at the University of Georgia Law School on February 27, 1969. Many movements are discernible in these turbulent clays of social change and revolution. Not least is a great tidal movement, global in its dimensions, for the articulation, extension, and more effective vindication of human rights. The celebration in 1968 of the twentieth anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations Assembly of the Declaration of Human Rights riveted special attention on the human rights movement and makes the choice of this subject particularly appropriate at this time.

Since the phrasing is so apt to describe the situation, I hope I shall be forgiven for cribbing a part of Shakespeare's familiar sentence and using it in my title.