Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

Economic and social rights occupy a contentious space in contemporary studies of human rights and comparative constitutional law. Such rights – which are mobilized politically and legally to claim an adequate standard of living, health care, education, housing, decent work, food, water, sanitation, and a clean and healthy environment – are often contradictory or ambiguous. This reading group explores their contemporary appeal. Readings are primarily legal, and draw on comparative sources, as well as interdisciplinary work. The group begins with philosophical evaluations of the importance of the equality of human “capabilities,” as against classically liberal rights, and communitarian, welfarist, and ecological objections. The readings then progress to the institutional puzzles that reflect and extend these debates, with empirical examples as to how such rights, including so-called positive rights, are accommodated and enforced, including under new models of adjudication, distinctive remedies, so-called “fourth branches” of government, democratic spaces of distributive contestation, changed assumptions of political economy, innovations from city-level to extraterritorial state responsibility, and transformative versus preservative approaches to constitutional democracy.

Note: This reading group will meet on the following dates: TBD.