Courting social justice : judicial enforcement of social and economic rights in the developing world / edited by Varun Gauri, Daniel M. Brinks. electronic resource

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Litigating for social justice in post-apartheid South Africa : a focus on health and education / Jonathan Berger -- Accountability for social and economic rights in Brazil / Florian F. Hoffmann and Fernando R.N.M. Bentes -- Courts and socioeconomic rights in India / Shylashri Shankar and Pratap Bhanu Mehta -- The impact of economic and social rights in Nigeria : an assessment of the legal framework for implementing education and health as human rights / Chidi Anselm Odinkalu -- The implementation of the rights to health care and education in Indonesia / Bivitri Susanti -- Transforming legal theory in the light of practice : the judicial application of social and economic rights to private orderings / Helen Hershkoff -- A new policy landscape : legalizing social and economic rights in the developing world / Daniel M. Brinks and Varun Gauri.

This book is a first-of-its-kind, five-country empirical study of the causes and consequences of social and economic rights litigation. Detailed studies of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa present systematic and nuanced accounts of court activity on social and economic rights in each country. The book develops new methodologies for analyzing the sources of and variation in social and economic rights litigation, explains why actors are now turning to the courts to enforce social and economic rights, measures the aggregate impact of litigation in each country, and assesses the relevance of the empirical findings for legal theory. This book argues that courts can advance social and economic rights under the right conditions precisely because they are never fully independent of political pressures.