Relaunching the IACL Research Group on Social Rights, 2020

We are pleased to announce the relaunch of the IACL Research Group on Social Rights (RGSR) in 2020. As we enter a new decade with newer challenges being mounted to existing regimes of social protection and the enactment of new ones, the RGSR serves as a semi-institutionalised setting for sharpening current debates in legal scholarship and proposing directions for further research. The RGSR looks to enable scholarly conversations between academics researching and writing about international and domestic law relating to social rights.

Substantively, the RGSR will ask newer questions about the relationship between social rights and the broader political and social setting within which they are embedded. In an age of deepening inequality, what role should citizen entitlements from the government play in creating a safety net to provide the conditions necessary for human flourishing? How should levels of entitlements be judicially managed and adjudicated? Should courts or the representative branches be the focus of engagement for civil society coalitions? 

These are only some of the questions which this RG will engage with while acknowledging that the research agenda will be set in a collaborative way by the members of the RGSR. Three lines of enquiry form the priority for the RGSR, with members being free to suggest additions or elaborations, as well as sub-questions which can be subsumed within these. 

First, theorizing responses to claims that SR serve to cement a political imaginary concerned primarily with adequacy, rather than the setting of standards. Relatedly, the RGSR will look to situate its discussions within the broader political economy in which these rights are articulated. 

Second, the RGSR will explore the institutional forms which such responses can take, including newer forms of judicial review, or the increasing use of diagonal forms of accountability in the shape of human rights commissions and ombudsman bodies. 

Third, the RGSR will explore the relationship between equitable outcomes in social provisioning and the increasing algorithmization of the welfare beneficiary identification and delivery processes. 

Fourth, the RGSR will consider questions on the relationship between domestic constitutional and supranational adjudicatory responses to changes in social entitlements which have been altered in the wake of the global financial crisis. 

Fifth, the RGSR will consider the lessons which can be drawn from the judicial treatment of social rights across a variety of jurisdictions and what their implications are for comparative constitutional theory. 

As part of the relaunch, we aim to facilitate the dissemination of our group's research to a broader audience through short blog posts of approximately 600 - 800 words which will be posted on the RGSR site, while also being crossposted on the IACL Blog. Please email your proposals (100 words) for posts on issues relating to any of the above-identified areas by 5 March 2020 to Gaurav Mukherjee (mukherjee_gaurav@phd.ceu.edu). 

-  George Katrougalos

    Marcelo Figueiredo

    Victor Bazan

    Gaurav Mukherjee