The Impact of the Judicial Precedents on the Normative Content of Human Rights

Abstract

The major objective of this article is to emphasise the importance and the role of precedent – understood in broad terms – in forming the normative reality, exerting an impact on the content of normative elements, including human rights, particularly women’s rights. Being an essential part of the normative reality, precedents are a particular kind of normative messages of a considerable power. Taken into account their narrative form, comprehensiveness of the content, media hype and possibilities of a mass broadcasting, precedents constitute an important element and play a significant role in forming the normative reality, which is characteristic for the present-day society. Being a phenomenon characteristic for a post-modernist society, the normative reality is understood in contrast to static conceptions of a normative or axionormative order, which have a given structure and distinct boundaries. The analysis of precedent rulings, stemming from various law orders, regarding women’s equal rights in the employment process, aims at highlighting their importance both in forming the content of human rights and their impact on law and law enactment.