LAUSR

This volume of Public Integrity presents a symposium of five articles related to human rights that (a) introduce readers to the general origin and nature of human rights conversation, (b) characterize how these norms are conveyed in the current digital age, or (c) depict how local governments and nonprofit agencies confront matters of human rights. Nonetheless, in publishing this symposium, PI “pushes the envelope” in asserting that human rights questions legitimately qualify as matters germane to the study and practice of public administration. Readers could, after all, maintain that, notwithstanding the aspirational appeal of human rights, international norms fall well outside the parameters of sovereign states and their respective regime values (e.g., Rohr, 1989, pp. 59–95). Mindful of the merits on both sides of the argument, this symposium introduction enlists Chester Newland’s (2012) (combined) book reviews “Values and Virtues in Public Administration: Post-NPM Global Fracture and Search for Human Dignity and Reasonableness” in the Public Administration Review to support the affirmative case. At one point Newland asserts,