Download or read book Social Rights Under the Constitution written by Cécile Fabre and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The desirability, or lack thereof, of bills of rights has been the focus of some of the most enduring political debates over the last two centuries. Unlike civil and political rights, social rights to the meeting of needs, standardly rights to adequate minimum income, education, housing, andhealth care are not usually given constitutional protection. This book argues that social rights should be constitutionalized and protected by the courts, and examines when such constitutionalization conflicts with democracy. It is thus located at the crossroads of two major issues of contemporarypolitical philosophy, to wit, the issue of democracy and the issue of distributie justice. Interestingly and surprisingly enough, philosophers who engage in penetrating discussions on distributive justice do not usually reflect on the implications of their argument for democracy; they are met withequal indifference on the part of theorists of democracy. This book stems from the perception that there may be conflicts between the demands of democracy and the demands of distributive justice, both of which are crucially important, and from the resulting recognition that the question of therelationship between these two values cannot be ignored.
Download or read book Social Rights Under the Constitution written by Cécile Fabre and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-03-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The desirability, or lack thereof, of bills of rights has been the focus of some of the most enduring political debates over the last two centuries. Unlike civil and political rights, social rights to the meeting of needs, standardly rights to adequate minimum income, education, housing, and health care are not usually given constitutional protection. This book argues that social rights should be constitutionalized and protected by the courts, and examines when such constitutionalization conflicts with democracy. It is thus located at the crossroads of two major issues of contemporary political philosophy, to wit, the issue of democracy and the issue of distributie justice. Interestingly and surprisingly enough, philosophers who engage in penetrating discussions on distributive justice do not usually reflect on the implications of their argument for democracy; they are met with equal indifference on the part of theorists of democracy. This book stems from the perception that there may be conflicts between the demands of democracy and the demands of distributive justice, both of which are crucially important, and from the resulting recognition that the question of the relationship between these two values cannot be ignored.
Download or read book Socio economic Rights written by Sandra Liebenberg and published by Juta and Company Ltd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Weak Courts Strong Rights written by Mark Tushnet and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike many other countries, the United States has few constitutional guarantees of social welfare rights such as income, housing, or healthcare. In part this is because many Americans believe that the courts cannot possibly enforce such guarantees. However, recent innovations in constitutional design in other countries suggest that such rights can be judicially enforced--not by increasing the power of the courts but by decreasing it. In Weak Courts, Strong Rights, Mark Tushnet uses a comparative legal perspective to show how creating weaker forms of judicial review may actually allow for stronger social welfare rights under American constitutional law. Under "strong-form" judicial review, as in the United States, judicial interpretations of the constitution are binding on other branches of government. In contrast, "weak-form" review allows the legislature and executive to reject constitutional rulings by the judiciary--as long as they do so publicly. Tushnet describes how weak-form review works in Great Britain and Canada and discusses the extent to which legislatures can be expected to enforce constitutional norms on their own. With that background, he turns to social welfare rights, explaining the connection between the "state action" or "horizontal effect" doctrine and the enforcement of social welfare rights. Tushnet then draws together the analysis of weak-form review and that of social welfare rights, explaining how weak-form review could be used to enforce those rights. He demonstrates that there is a clear judicial path--not an insurmountable judicial hurdle--to better enforcement of constitutional social welfare rights.
Download or read book Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places written by Emily Zackin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-21 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the federal Constitution. Emily Zackin shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. Zackin looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism. Shedding much-needed light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.
Download or read book Social Rights Under the Constitution written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1.2. Rights
Download or read book The People s Constitution written by John F. Kowal and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution—the product of compromises and an artifact of its time—and made it more democratic Who wrote the Constitution? That’s obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in 1787. But much of the Constitution was actually written later, in a series of twenty-seven amendments enacted over the course of two centuries. The real history of the Constitution is the astonishing story of how subsequent generations have reshaped our founding document amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. It’s a story of how We the People have improved our government’s structure and expanded the scope of our democracy during eras of transformational social change. The People’s Constitution is an elegant, sobering, and masterly account of the evolution of American democracy. From the addition of the Bill of Rights, a promise made to save the Constitution from near certain defeat, to the post–Civil War battle over the Fourteenth Amendment, from the rise and fall of the “noble experiment” of Prohibition to the defeat and resurgence of an Equal Rights Amendment a century in the making, The People’s Constitution is the first book of its kind: a vital guide to America’s national charter, and an alternative history of the continuing struggle to realize the Framers’ promise of a more perfect union.
Download or read book How Constitutional Rights Matter written by Adam Chilton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does constitutionalizing rights improve respect for those rights in practice? Drawing on statistical analyses, survey experiments, and case studies from around the world, this book argues that enforcing constitutional rights is not easy, but that some rights are harder to repress than others. First, enshrining rights in constitutions does not automatically ensure that those rights will be respected. For rights to matter, rights violations need to be politically costly. But this is difficult to accomplish for unconnected groups of citizens. Second, some rights are easier to enforce than others, especially those with natural constituencies that can mobilize for their enforcement. This is the case for rights that are practiced by and within organizations, such as the rights to religious freedom, to unionize, and to form political parties. Because religious groups, trade unions and parties are highly organized, they are well-equipped to use the constitution to resist rights violations. As a result, these rights are systematically associated with better practices. By contrast, rights that are practiced on an individual basis, such as free speech or the prohibition of torture, often lack natural constituencies to enforce them, which makes it easier for governments to violate these rights. Third, even highly organized groups armed with the constitution may not be able to stop governments dedicated to rights-repression. When constitutional rights are enforced by dedicated organizations, they are thus best understood as speed bumps that slow down attempts at repression. An important contribution to comparative constitutional law, this book provides a comprehensive picture of the spread of constitutional rights, and their enforcement, around the world.
Download or read book How Rights Went Wrong written by Jamal Greene and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.
Download or read book Human Rights Of By and For the People written by Keri Iyall Smith and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights comprise the constitutional foundation of the United States. These—the oldest governing documents still in use in the world—urgently need an update, just as the constitutions of other countries have been updated and revised. Human Rights Of, By, and For the People brings together lawyers and sociologists to show how globalization and climate change offer an opportunity to revisit the founding documents. Each proposes specific changes that would more closely align US law with international law. The chapters also illustrate how constitutions are embedded in society and shaped by culture. The constitution itself sets up contentious relationships among the three branches of government and between the federal government and each state government, while the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments begrudgingly recognize the civil and political rights of citizens. These rights are described by legal scholars as "negative rights," specifically as freedoms from infringements rather than as positive rights that affirm personhood and human dignity. The contributors to this volume offer "positive rights" instead. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), written in the middle of the last century, inspires these updates. Nearly every other constitution in the world has adopted language from the UDHR. The contributors use intersectionality, critical race theory, and contemporary critiques of runaway economic inequality to ground their interventions in sociological argument.
Download or read book Human Rights and Social Policy in the 21st Century written by Joseph Wronka and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1998 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previous edition, 1st, published in 1992.
Download or read book Exploring Social Rights written by Daphne Barak-Erez and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-12-19 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring Social Rights looks into the theoretical and practical implications of social rights. The book is organised in five parts. Part I considers theoretical aspects of social rights, and looks into their place within political and legal theory and within the human rights tradition; Part II looks at the status of social rights in international law, with reference to the challenge of globalisation and to the significance of specific regional regulation (such as the European System); Part III includes discussions of various legal systems which are of special interest in this area (Canada, South Africa, India and Israel); Part IV looks at the content of a few central social rights (such as the right to education and the right to health); and Part V discusses the relevance of social rights to distinct social groups (women and people with disabilities). The articles in the book, while using the category of social rights, also challenge the separation of rights into distinct categories and question the division of rights to 'civil' vs 'social' rights, from a perspective which considers all rights as 'social'. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with human rights, the legal protection of social rights and social policy. 'Social rights are the stepchildren of the human rights family. Are they really 'rights'? Can courts enforce them? And does it make any difference when they try? This remarkable collection of essays by distinguished scholars offers important new responses to all the basic questions. Ranging across disciplinary and national boundaries and brimming with both theoretical and practical insights, the book is especially welcome in this moment of mounting inequalities and growing interest in the possibilities and perils of social rights.' William E Forbath, Lloyd M Bentsen Chair in Law and Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin 'At the auspicious moment of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and more than half a century since the beginning of the Human Rights Revolution–a time characterized by the end of the cold war, globalization and privatization, comes this important compilation which critically revisits the international commitment to social rights, and reconceives its core distinguishing principles–from crosscutting comparative, theoretical and practical perspectives–illuminating our commitment to human security.' Ruti Teitel, Ernst Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School. Author, 'Transitional Justice' (OUP 2002)
Download or read book Social Rights Under the Constitution written by Cécile Fabre and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 3.2. Bills of rights.
Download or read book Civil Rights the Constitution and Congress 1863 1869 written by Earl M. Maltz and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a close analysis of legislative proceedings and of the precise language used, Maltz builds a strong case that Congressional actions on civil rights, including statutes such as the Freedman's Bureau Bill, the District of Columbia Suffrage Bill, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, as well as the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the early Reconstruction era generally reflected the ideology and intentions of the more conservative Republicans. These "moderates" advocated limited absolute equality rather than total racial equality and opposed the undue federal regulation of private and state actions.
Download or read book Sociology and Human Rights written by Judith Blau and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2011-05-11 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique volume designed to provoke an ongoing dialogue about fundamental human rights in our society Edited by renowned scholars, Judith Blau and Mark Frezzo, this groundbreaking anthology examines the implications that human rights have for the social sciences. The book provides readers with a wide-ranging collection of articles, each written by experts in their fields who argue for an expansion of fundamental human rights in the United States. To provide an international context, the volume covers the human rights treaties that have been incorporated into the constitutions of many countries throughout the world, including wealthy nations such as Spain and Sweden and impoverished countries such as Bolivia and Croatia.
Download or read book How Constitutional Rights Matter written by Adam Chilton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-19 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does constitutionalizing rights improve respect for those rights in practice? Drawing on statistical analyses, survey experiments, and case studies from around the world, this book argues that enforcing constitutional rights is not easy, but that some rights are harder to repress than others. First, enshrining rights in constitutions does not automatically ensure that those rights will be respected. For rights to matter, rights violations need to be politically costly. But this is difficult to accomplish for unconnected groups of citizens. Second, some rights are easier to enforce than others, especially those with natural constituencies that can mobilize for their enforcement. This is the case for rights that are practiced by and within organizations, such as the rights to religious freedom, to unionize, and to form political parties. Because religious groups, trade unions and parties are highly organized, they are well-equipped to use the constitution to resist rights violations. As a result, these rights are systematically associated with better practices. By contrast, rights that are practiced on an individual basis, such as free speech or the prohibition of torture, often lack natural constituencies to enforce them, which makes it easier for governments to violate these rights. Third, even highly organized groups armed with the constitution may not be able to stop governments dedicated to rights-repression. When constitutional rights are enforced by dedicated organizations, they are thus best understood as speed bumps that slow down attempts at repression. An important contribution to comparative constitutional law, this book provides a comprehensive picture of the spread of constitutional rights, and their enforcement, around the world.
Download or read book The Constitution of Equality written by Thomas Christiano and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the ethical basis of democracy? And what reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? And when do we have reason to say that we may justly ignore democratic decisions? These questions must be answered if we are to have answers to some of the most important questions facing our global community, which include whether there is a human right to democracy and whether we must attempt to spread democracy throughout the globe. This book provides a philosophical account of the moral foundations of democracy and of liberalism. It shows how democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways they can see are treating them as equals. The principle of public equality is shown to be the fundamental principle of social justice. This account enables us to understand the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life. It gives an account of the grounds of the authority of democracy. It also shows when the authority of democracy runs out. The author shows how the violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy, how the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons weaken the legitimate authority of democracy.
