Constituting Economic and Social Rights

• Develops an original, analytic model for understanding the rapid legal expansion of socio-economic rights, and their impact on public law and constitutional theory
• Contains comparative examples from such constitutions as South Africa, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, India, United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as international systems, enriching the comparative law literature
• Draws on judicial, legislative, and executive interactions, as well as civil society and market participants, in a sophisticated legal methodology, overcoming the limitations of traditional court-focused studies
• Includes a foreword by Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School

Food, water, health, housing, and education are as fundamental to human freedom and dignity as privacy, religion, or speech. Yet only recently have legal systems begun to secure these fundamental individual interests as rights. This book looks at the dynamic processes that render economic and social rights in legal form. It argues that processes of interpretation, enforcement, and contestation each reveal how economic and social interests can be protected as human and constitutional rights, and how their protection changes public law. 

Drawing on constitutional examples from South Africa, Colombia, Ghana, India, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, the book examines innovations in the design and role of institutions such as courts, legislatures, executives, and agencies in the organization of social movements and in the links established with market actors. This comparative study shows how legal systems protect economic and social rights by shifting the focus from minimum bundles of commodities or entitlements to processes of value-based, deliberative problem solving. Theories of constitutionalism and governance inform the potential of this approach to reconcile economic and social rights with both democratic and market principles, while addressing the material inequality, poverty and social conflict caused, in part, by law itself.

Readership: Academics and students working in constitutional law, constitutional theory, social justice, human rights law, human rights theory, political science or political theory.