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. On the other hand, it has been argued that it is unnecessary (because statutory recognition is sufficient) and even harmful because it invites judges to enter into the field of social policy where they have neither competence nor legitimacy to act.

This policy brief sets out some of the recent case law on the right to the highest attainable standard of health and argues that this jurisprudence exposes the unnecessarily narrow construction of the social contract.

This report presents the views of a number of leading medical and legal experts on the complex evidential issues arising at inquests into sudden adult deaths. Participants include Michael Burgess OBE (HM Coroner of the Royal Household and Legal Secretary of the Coroners’ Society of England & Wales) and Professor Hugh Watkins (an expert in molecular genetics and molecular biology of heart muscle disease).

This policy brief provides an overview of technological risk regulation and assesses the role of courts in reviewing the same. In doing so, it shows that the question of the capacity of courts is problematized by at least two different aspects: constitutional and institutional, both of which are malleable and context-specific.