Constitutional and Administrative Law

Food, water, health, housing and education are as fundamental to human freedom and dignity as are privacy, religion or speech. Yet only recently have legal systems began to secure these fundamental individual interests as rights. This book looks at the dynamic processes that "constitute" the legality of economic and social rights. It argues that processes of interpretation, enforcement and contestation each reveal how economic and social interests can be protected as human and constitutional rights, and how their protection changes public law. Using constitutional examples from South Africa, Colombia, Ghana, India, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, the book examines innovations in the design and role of institutions such as courts, legislatures, executives, and agencies, in the organization of social movements and in the links established with market actors. This comparative study shows how legal systems protect economic and social rights by shifting the focus from minimum bundles of commodities or entitlements to processes of value-based, deliberative problem solving. Theories of constitutionalism and governance inform the potential of this approach to reconcile economic and social rights with both democratic and market principles, while addressing the material inequality, poverty and social conflict caused, in part, by law itself.

On September 11, 2001, terrorism instantly became the defining issue of our time. The resulting debate surrounding the inherent tension between national security and individual civil rights has focused national and international attention on how post-9/11 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and around the world have been interrogated. All concerned agree that, while interrogation practices represent a crucial meeting ground between human rights and counterterrorism measures, the limits placed on interrogators are perhaps the most difficult to define, for they determine how “far” a civil society is willing to go in eliciting information necessary for its self-defense. This book offers a theoretical analysis and practical application of coercive interrogation and in doing so, suggests developing and implementing a hybrid paradigm based on American criminal law, the Geneva Conventions, and the Israeli model of trial as the most relevant judicial regime. This book creatively utilizes a historical analysis of the system of “justice” for African Americans in the Deep South of the past century to serve as a guide for the constitutional rights and protections that should be granted or extended to an unprotected class. The book then indicates which methods are within the boundaries of the law while providing interrogators the tools required to protect America's vital interests.