As the climate emergency intensifies, rights-based climate cases - litigation that is based on human rights law - are becoming an increasingly important tool for securing more ambitious climate action. This book is the first to offer a systematic analysis of the universe of these cases known as human rights and climate change (HRCC) cases. By combining theory, empirical documentation, and strategic debate among preeminent scholars and practitioners from around the world, the book captures the roots, legal innovations, empirical richness, impact, and challenges of this dynamic field of sociolegal practice. It looks specifically at the sociolegal origins and trajectory of HRCC cases, the legal innovations of this type of litigation, and the strategies and impacts of these cases. In doing so, this book equips litigators, researchers, practitioners, students, and concerned citizens with an understanding of an important method of holding governments and corporations accountable for climate harms. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book is an empirical study of contributions by courts in the Global South to comparative constitutionalism. It offers an analytical framework for understanding these constitutional innovations and illustrates them with a qualitative study of the most ambitious case in constitutional adjudication in Latin America over the last decade: the Colombian Constitutional Court's structural injunction affecting the rights of over five million internally displaced people and its implementation process. Although the ruling (known as T25) was handed down in 2004, its monitoring process continues. This book traces the case's evolution from its origin to its effects on policy, politics and public opinion. It also compares the implementation and effects of T25 with those of other rulings on the rights to health, food, housing, and prison overcrowding in Colombia, India and South Africa. The study's insights will be of interest to scholars of comparative constitutionalism in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The regulation of business in the global economy poses one of the main challenges for governance, as illustrated by the dynamic scholarly and policy debates about the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and a possible international treaty on the matter. This book takes on the conceptual and legal underpinnings of global governance approaches to business and human rights, with an emphasis on the Guiding Principles (GPs) and attention to the current treaty process. Analyses of the GPs have tended to focus on their static dimension, such as the standards they include, rather than on their capacity to change, to push the development of new norms, and practices that might go beyond the initial content of the GPs and improve corporate compliance with human rights. This book engages both the static and dynamic dimensions of the GPs, and considers the issue through the eyes of scholars and practitioners from different parts of the world.

The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of judgments on social rights around the world. However, we know little about whether these rulings have been implemented. Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance is the first book to engage in a comparative study of compliance of social rights judgments as well as their broader effects. Covering fourteen different domestic and international jurisdictions, and drawing on multiple disciplines, it finds significant variance in outcomes and reveals both spectacular successes and failures in making social rights a reality on the ground. This variance is strikingly similar to that found in previous studies on civil rights, and the key explanatory factors lie in the political calculus of defendants and the remedial framework. The book also discusses which strategies have enhanced implementation, and focuses on judicial reflexivity, alliance building and social mobilisation.

The regulation of business in the global economy poses one of the main challenges for governance, as illustrated by the dynamic scholarly and policy debates about the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and a possible international treaty on the matter. This book takes on the conceptual and legal underpinnings of global governance approaches to business and human rights, with an emphasis on the Guiding Principles (GPs) and attention to the current treaty process. Analyses of the GPs have tended to focus on their static dimension, such as the standards they include, rather than on their capacity to change, to push the development of new norms, and practices that might go beyond the initial content of the GPs and improve corporate compliance with human rights. This book engages both the static and dynamic dimensions of the GPs, and considers the issue through the eyes of scholars and practitioners from different parts of the world.

This book focusses on the debates concerning aspects of intellectual property law that bear on access to medicines in a set of developing countries. Specifically, the contributors look at measures that regulate the acquisition, recognition, and use of patent rights on pharmaceuticals and trade secrets in data concerning them, along with the conditions under which these rights expire so as to permit the production of cheaper generic drugs. In addition, the book includes commentary from scholars in human rights, international institutions, and transnational activism. The case studies presented from 11 Latin American countries, have many commonalities in terms of economics, legal systems, and political histories, and yet they differ in the balance each has struck between proprietary interests and access concerns. The book documents this cross-country variation in legal norms and practice, identifies the factors that have led to differences in result, and theorizes as to how differentials among these countries occur and why they endure within a common transnational regulatory regime. The work concludes by putting the results of the investigations into a global administrative law frame and offers suggestions on institutional mechanisms for considering the trade-offs between health and wealth.

The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of judgments on social rights around the world. However, we know little about whether these rulings have been implemented. Social Rights Judgments and the Politics of Compliance is the first book to engage in a comparative study of compliance of social rights judgments as well as their broader effects. Covering fourteen different domestic and international jurisdictions, and drawing on multiple disciplines, it finds significant variance in outcomes and reveals both spectacular successes and failures in making social rights a reality on the ground. This variance is strikingly similar to that found in previous studies on civil rights, and the key explanatory factors lie in the political calculus of defendants and the remedial framework. The book also discusses which strategies have enhanced implementation, and focuses on judicial reflexivity, alliance building and social mobilisation.