Rothenberg interviewed on 'Horizon'


Daniel Rothenberg, executive director of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law’s Center for Law and Global Affairs, recently talked about his new responsibilities at the law school during a segment on Channel 8’s Horizon.

Program host Ted Simons asked Rothenberg for his take on the controversial new immigration law in Arizona, and to explain the Center’s human rights indicators project. Rothenberg, who also is a Professor of Practice, joined the College of Law in August from DePaul University College of Law where he was Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute.

 \Rothenberg mentioned the diversity of researchers, from international organizations and the United Nations to the U.S. Department of State, which have gathered information about human rights situations around the world.

“It’s now time to bring some focus, rigor and coordination between these different efforts,” he said. “We could do that by first figuring out which areas of human rights we want to focus on and then try to come up with particular kinds of investigations. We could, for example, look at the rule of law and try to understand the way in which court systems operate, then create a rubric for analyzing court systems in different countries, and gather data so that we could compare those operations across the board.”

This process will enable the Center to “take this very important area of politics and society – human rights – and move it to the next level so that it functions in a way that is more prescriptive,” Rothenberg said, “so that we are able to identify a problem, come up with an attempted solution for it and be able to measure whether that solution has actually produced the benefit that we hoped to achieve.”

To watch the interview go to www.azpbs.org/horizon/detailvid.php?id=2541