Book Review: Socio-economic Rights. Adjudication Under a Transformative Constitution

Abstract

Every so often time and place and effort converge to bring about something transformative in law’s promise to justice. And every so often, a discrete book stands in to document, theorize, contextualize, and even help to create this shift. If South Africa’s entrenchment of justiciable economic and social rights represents such a legal transformation, Sandra Liebenberg’s Socio-Economic Rights: Adjudication under a Transformative Constitution has all the makings of such a book. Of course, South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution of 1996 has produced a rich literature across many fields of law,1 but this book is distinct in the way that it focuses on the constitutional ambition to realize economic and social rights against a backdrop of endemic poverty and inequality, a theme that is used to orient the broader court-led legal changes that are now authorized and mandated under these provisions.