Daily Read: Toni Williams on Brinks & Gauri on Rights

Over at Jotwell, UK Law Prof Toni Williams (pictured) has a review entitled "Getting Rights Right," considering Daniel M. Brinks & Varun Gauri, Law's Majestic Equality? The Distributive Impact of Litigating Social and Economic Rights, World Bank Development Research Group Working Paper 5999 (March 2012), available on ssrn. 

Williams captures the "rights" and "social change" and "judicial review" debates under consideration thusly:

To investigate the distributive impact of socio-economic rights litigation is, of course, to engage with well-established and often-repeated findings about litigation processes and courts as tending either to favour the rich and powerful, the “haves” of the societies in which they are situated, or, more likely, to be ineffectual. Brinks and Gauri believe that such claims about the regressive impact and impotence of rights litigation over-generalise from a limited number and narrow range of courts, cases, constitutions and countries. They claim that a more systematic analysis, taking into account variation between different types of cases and characteristics of courts, shows that litigating social and economic rights may sometimes yield robustly pro-poor effects, at least in the areas of health care provision and education.

 For those seeking a more global view of rights litigation than is so often present in US conversations, Williams' suggestion is an important one. 

RR