The Judicial Enforcement of Socio-Economic Rights in Comparative Perspective.

The judicial enforcement of socio-economic rights raises several questions about the legitimacy of the judicial function. Judicial legitimacy, in the words of James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira, "means that people accept judicial decisions, even those they bitterly oppose, because they view courts as appropriate institutions for making such decisions." The traditional view has been that the enforcement of socio-economic rights are decisions inappropriate for courts to be making because they exceed the capacity of courts, compel governments to take actions not authorized by the people's representatives, and redistribute resources to pay for them. Whether courts can perform these tasks competently and give meaning to social welfare rights without undermining the principles of separation of powers and representative democracy will have consequences on the legitimacy of the judicial function. This paper examines how courts and quasi-judicial institutions, such as human rights commissions, at the international, regional, and national levels of governance have given meaning to the socio-economic rights that are entrenched in various treaties, charters, and constitutions for which they are responsible. My aim is twofold: 1) to compare the approaches to these rights employed by courts and other institutions at the international, regional, and national levels of governance, and 2) to contribute to the debate over the legitimacy of judicial action in this area of law. Special emphasis is devoted to the trend toward the increased reliance on "weak form judicial review" by courts and more forceful recommendations by regional human rights commissions to protect social welfare rights, what I call convergence toward hybrid approaches employing hard law and soft law measures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]