We are an informal, international network of lawyers, judges, other human rights advocates, and academics focusing on Social & Economic Rights (SER). We seek to identify and promote legal developments in the service of social justice. Within that broad framework, we represent a wide range of viewpoints. Our working premise is that enacting, implementing, and enforcing SER can play a significant role in making our societies more equal, just, inclusive, and caring, and in fostering human dignity and self-realization. We also see expanding SER as a way of deepening democracy because SER are constitutive of democracy in the broadest sense. Our beliefs mix reason and experience with hope. How effective SER-based legal approaches will be in advancing social justice and improving the quality of life in the new century remains a question for study and debate.
Our Mission
We seek to encourage and develop critical and transformative thinking about SER and SER-based legal strategies. iSERP provides a space where SER-practitioners, activists, and academics can cast critical and introspective light on our work, reflect on its strengths and weaknesses, and develop ideas and methodologies for improving the effectiveness of SER-based legal work. We believe that progress in this field gains from close dialogue between practice-based and academic perspectives.
Over the long run, we hope to assist practitioners and activists attempting to justify, secure, and enforce SER. We aspire to generate legal approaches that will encourage legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, regional and international commissions and agencies, and other decision makers to take a robust and creative approach to SER and anti-discrimination law. At the same time, we hope to make evident to all that social justice movements of disadvantaged and disenfranchised people claim legal rights that state and society have denied them. To the extent that SER pose novel questions that do not fit comfortably within traditional legal molds, we aim to develop new legal ideas and theories supportive of SER approaches. We have particularly focused on modernizing the theory of separation-of-powers, democratic theory, and the proper scope of judicial review, devising sophisticated remedies for SER cases, facilitating grassroots and community participation in the legal process, and examining the impact of SER and transformative constitutions on questions of private law, economic democracy, and economic development.
What We Do
Our initial activities have consisted of organizing international workshops to share and interrogate grassroots experience, legal developments, and legal theory relative to SER. We seek a collegial, non-hierarchic, and dialogic format for these events in keeping with our egalitarian aspirations. In the future, we expect to expand our activities to include:
- structured research projects leading to publication
- ad hoc meetings and workshops to address particular problems and to reach wider audiences
- judicial trainings
We will not duplicate functions that other groups and institutes already perform admirably, such as addressing strategic and technical issues in current litigation or providing a clearinghouse for SER documents. Our group seeks outreach to and connection with others in the field; however, our meetings are generally in the format of small working groups by invitation.
Our publications include:
Helena Alviar García, Karl Klare and Lucy A. Williams, Social and Economic Rights in Theory and Practice: Critical Inquiries (Routledge, 2015).
Events
iSERP Meeting
April 24-27, 2024
The iSERP 10 meeting was graciously hosted by the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences, School of Law, University of Concepción, Concepción, Chile, on April 24-27, 2024, under the leadership of Professor Amaya Alvez Marin. This was iSERP’s first in-person meeting since the pandemic. Our energy and spirits ran high despite the menacing climate for human rights in today’s world. Human rights advocates and scholars attended from as far away as India, South Africa, the UK and Canada, as well as many from Latin America. Attendees included Justice Natalia Angel Cabo, Constitutional Court of Colombia; Colm O’Cinneade, who for a decade was a member of the European Committee on Social Rights, Council of Europe; Esteban Hoyos Ceballos, dean of the Faculty of Law, EAFIT University, Medellín, Colombia; and Danie Brand, director of the Free State Centre of Human Rights, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Long-standing iSERP participants were joined by a marvelous group of Chilean colleagues some of whom we hope will remain with the group. Our program this year focused on four areas: the future of social and economic rights in a world of encroaching conservative-populist ascendancy; lessons to be learned from recent, unsuccessful efforts to revise the Chilean constitution by popular referendum; the growing role of socio-economic rights law in addressing the climate crisis; and the rights and needs of indigenous peoples. A highlight of the conference was an address by Gabriel Kurrüman, coordinator of the University’s Interculturality Program. Prof. Kurrüman described his work to advance the equality, dignity and social inclusion of indigenous peoples in the university and broader civil community of Concepción, which we learned is Mapuche ancestral territory and historically a site of intercommunal knowledge exchange.
Intrapandemic activities
On October 31, 2022, Northeastern Law’s Center for Public Interest Advocacy and Collaboration and other campus groups hosted iSERP member Dr. Amaya Alvez Marin, professor of law at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Concepción, in Concepción, Chile. During 2021-2022, Dr. Alvez Marin was an elected member of the Constituent Assembly and played a leading role in drafting a proposed constitution for Chile. Her lecture described political and technical aspects of the drafting process and reported on the events leading to rejection of the draft by referendum. Dr. Jackie Dugard, senior lecturer at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, responded to Alvez Marin’s lecture. A long-standing iSERP member, Dr. Dugard taught for many years at Wits Law School, University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds advanced degrees in both law and the social sciences. Her activism, research and extensive publications focus on power and exclusion across a wide range of fields — socio-economic rights, especially rights to housing, land and water; gender-based violence; property law; access to justice; and the role of law and courts in social change, protest and social movements.
Most in-person meetings were suspended during the pandemic but the iSERP network continued to meet periodically by Zoom. For example, the public meeting featuring Professor Alvez was followed by a Zoom gathering of the network for in-depth discussion. ISERP plans to resume in-person meetings with a gathering in Concepción, Chile, tentatively scheduled for January 2024.
iSERP participants came together in November 2017 at Universidad EAFIT, in Medellín, Colombia, for a discussion of the trajectory of Latin American social constitutionalism, particularly on the question of land rights and indigenous peoples.