Social Rights Jurisprudence

In the space of two decades, social rights have emerged from the shadows and margins of human rights jurisprudence. The authors in this book provide a critical analysis of almost two thousand judgments and decisions from twenty-nine national and international jurisdictions. The breadth of the decisions is vast, from the resettlement of evictees to the regulation of private medical plans to the development of state programs to address poverty and illiteracy. The jurisprudence not only implicates our understanding of economic, social, and cultural rights, but also challenges the philosophical debates that question whether these rights can and should be justiciable.

Working with progressive conceptual categories relating to indigenous property, cultural identity, the right to an adequate standard of living and healthcare, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights continues to build a justiciability to determine the social rights of marginalised individuals and groups in the Americas. In a context of interpretative tensions of the social rights as political goals and direct effects provisions, Isaac de Paz González unveils the abilities, and the practices of the Inter-American Court’s contribution to the human rights practice in the Global South.

Captures significant transformations in the theory and practice of economic and social rights in constitutional and human rights law.

Since World War II, a growing number of jurisdictions in both the developing and industrialized worlds have adopted progressive constitutions that guarantee social and economic rights (SER) in addition to political and civil rights. Parallel developments have occurred at transnational level with the adoption of treaties that commit signatory states to respect and fulfil SER for their peoples. This book is a product of the International Social and Economic Rights Project (iSERP), a global consortium of judges, lawyers, human rights advocates, and legal academics who critically examine the effectiveness of SER law in promoting real change in people’s lives. The book addresses a range of practical, political, and legal questions under these headings, with acute sensitivity to the racial, cultural, and gender implications of SER and the path-breaking SER jurisprudence now emerging in the "Global South". The book brings together internationally renowned experts in the field of social and economic rights to discuss a range of rights controversies from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Contributors of the book consider specific issues in the litigation and adjudication of SER cases from the differing standpoints of activists, lawyers, and adjudicators in order to identify and address the specific challenges facing the SER community. This book will be of great use and interest to students and scholars of comparative constitutional law, human rights, public international law, development studies, and democratic political theory.

This book presents a unified set of arguments about the nature of jurisprudence and its relation to the jurist’s role. It explores contemporary challenges that create a need for social scientific perspectives in jurisprudence, and it shows how sociological resources can and should be used in considering juristic issues. Its overall aim is to redefine the concept of sociological jurisprudence and outline a new agenda for this. Supporting this agenda, the book elaborates a distinctive juristic perspective that recognises law’s diversity of cultural meanings, its extending transnational reach, its responsibilities to reflect popular aspirations for justice and security, and its integrative tasks as a general resource of regulation for society as a whole and for the individuals who interact under law’s protection. Drawing on and extending the author’s previous work, the book will be essential reading for students, researchers and academics working in jurisprudence, law and society, socio-legal studies, sociology of law, and comparative legal studies.

Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary resources, this scholarly work provides an in-depth and thorough analysis of the socio-economic rights jurisprudence of the newly democratic South Africa. The book explores how the judicial interpretation and enforcement of socio-economic rights can be more responsive to the conditions of systemic poverty and inequality characterising South African society. Based on meticulous research, the work marries legal analysis with perspectives from political philosophy and democratic theory.

This is the first book to map and explain compliance with judgments of social rights across multiple jurisdictions.

This exciting Research Handbook combines practitioner and academic perspectives to provide a comprehensive, cutting edge analysis of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), as well as the connection between ESCR and other rights. Offering an authoritative analysis of standards and jurisprudence, it argues for an expansive and inclusive approach to ESCR as human rights.