A report of a 2008 workshop with the Aspen Institute on national security, political, and communal crises.

Whether socio-economic rights should be entrenched in constitutions has been a subject of lively debate. On the one hand, it has been argued that such an entrenchment is necessary in order to recognize the worth and standing of those rights and in order to give individual claimants sufficient remedies in cases of a breach of a right.

In the United States, courts have played a key role in defining socio-economic rights and in enforcing the government's obligations to provide and protect those rights.

This policy brief examines the constitutional protection of socio-economic rights in their relationship to the political process.

A challenge for any democratic republic is to establish modes of governance that can effectively defeat or mitigate national security threats while also preserving freedoms and public accountability. To many, especially during national security crises, courts are expected to act as guardians of liberty and the boundaries of state power. 

The US Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v Gore, which effectively ended the 2000 presidential election, provoked a profound national debate about the role of the judiciary in resolving political disputes and raised still lingering questions about the Supreme Court’s credibility as a nonpartisan institution.

Quite where the boundaries of justifiable judicial social policymaking lie will depend on one’s own understanding of the nature and value of democracy. Most will agree that there is value to policy outcomes possessing democratic legitimacy, but that this should not mean that the rights and interests of minorities are routinely ignored.

Situations of emergency and crisis pose significant challenges to all branches of government, none more so than the courts.

What role could judicial review play in situations of dishonest corporatism?