School of Law

CfIG Second Century Workshop on Law and Experimentalism

30 September 2011 | 9.30am - 5.00pm | Workshop

LT 06, The Liberty Building

There is today an extensive debate on the propriety of incorporating social rights in constitutions. A core objection to constitutionalisation focuses on justiciability: courts, sceptics say, are poorly situated to enforce highly abstract, open-textured socio-economic commitments in the context of particular controversies; moreover, sceptics do not want judges to seize on ambiguous constitutional provisions to provide broad rulings that limit the citizens' democratic prerogatives.

The aim of the conference is to examine against the European, international and domestic background, and from a comparative perspective, the proposition that the creation of weak-form judicial review can go a long way in allaying or diffusing justifiability-related worries about constitutionalisation and democracy, and that weak remedies are a creative device for keeping independent judiciaries in the constitutional game, even where they work under obvious institutional limitations.