Sital Kalantry

Enhancing Enforcement of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights using Indicators: A Focus on the Right to Education in the ICESCR

Nearly fifteen years ago, Audrey Chapman emphasized the importance of ascertaining violations of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) as a means to enhance its enforcement. Today, this violations approach is even more salient given the recent adoption of the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR. This article focuses on the right to education in the ICESCR to illustrate how indicators can be employed to ascertain treaty compliance and violations. Indicators are important to enforcing economic, social, and cultural rights because they assist in measuring progressive realization. The methodology that we propose calls for: 1) analyzing the specific language of the treaty that pertains to the right in question; 2) defining the concept and scope of the right; 3) identifying appropriate indicators that correlate with state obligations; 4) setting benchmarks to measure progressive realization; and 5) clearly identifying violations of the right in question.

Litigation as a Measure of Well-Being

The common perception is that high or growing litigation rates in a country are a sign of societal pathology. Studies of litigation rates, however, consistently report that lawsuit filings per capita increase with economic prosperity, thus suggesting that litigation rates are a natural consequence of prosperity and not necessarily evidence of an overly litigious populace. India’s substantial interstate variation in litigation rates and in economic and noneconomic measures of well-being provide an opportunity to evaluate the relation between well-being and litigation rates. Using many years of data on civil filings in India’s lower courts and High Courts, we present evidence that more prosperous states have higher civil litigation rates. We also report the first evidence that accounting for noneconomic well-being, as measured by the education and life expectancy components of the Human Development Index, explains litigation rate patterns better than using a purely economic measure of well-being, GDP per capita. Despite India’s continuing economic growth, we present data that indicates India’s enormous and growing civil case backlog has discouraged civil case filings in recent years. These findings raise the question whether India’s future economic growth will be compromised if courts at all levels, particularly lower courts, do not resolve disputes more quickly.

The quiet power of indicators: measuring governance, corruption, and the rule of law

The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption and the Rule of Law, edited by Sally Engle Merry, Kevin E Davis and Benedict Kingsbury, is an exciting addition to law and society scholarship. Following their own introduction, the editors compile nine case studies that examine how indicators of legal governance are produced, and to what effect. The case studies — presented by expert academic contributors, many with significant parallel experience working as lawyers or social scientists within the jurisdictions and organisations they discuss — include the Transparency International Corruption (Perceptions) Index, the World Bank’s Country Performance Institutional Assessment (CPIA), Freedom House’s Freedom in the World indicator, the World Justice Project’s measurement of the Rule of Law, the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank’s Doing Business Index, the World Bank-supported Worldwide Governance Indicators, the Global Reporting Initiative’s structure for measuring and reporting on corporate social responsibility, and a number of indicators (including some listed above) that are used by the US Millennium Challenge Corporation for determining which countries are eligible to receive portions of US aid funding.

Book Review (reviewing Sandra Liebenberg, Socio-Economic Rights: Adjudication Under a Transformative Constitution (2010))

The South African Constitution is heralded for the broad protections it affords social and economic rights. In Socio-Economic Rights: Adjudication under a Transformative Constitution, Professor Sandra Liebenberg offers a thoughtful examination of the socioeconomic rights jurisprudence developed by South African courts since the adoption of the country’s current constitution fifteen years ago. In meticulous detail, she describes how the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and other South African courts has evolved in the area of socioeconomic rights. At the same time, she offers an incisive critique of this jurisprudence, identifying how it has too often been shaped by a narrow and formalistic conception of rights that overlooks their social justice purposes and reinforces deeply unequal social and economic relationships. Finally, Liebenberg offers suggestions for the future development of this jurisprudence in ways that would be more consonant with the transformative purposes of the South African Constitution. 1 This nuanced and engaging account stands as a masterful reference work for scholars and legal practitioners interested in the development of South Africa’s socioeconomic rights jurisprudence. At the same time, the very detail and comprehensiveness of the book’s discussion of this jurisprudence tends, in some places, to overshadow Liebenberg’s normative analysis. Additionally, it is not always readily apparent, particularly to readers who are not well-versed in South African case law, where the book’s descriptive passages end and Liebenberg’s prescriptions begin. However, the normative proposals that Liebenberg offers are both principled and practical, and they make an important contribution to global debates about how courts can and should give effect to social and economic rights. Among other things, Liebenberg points out the challenges that South African courts have encountered in deciding cases involving socioeconomic rights. South Africa’s constitution is unique in its robust protection of a wide array of socioeconomic rights,2 express commitment to substantive equality and social justice,3 embrace

Expanding the Feminist Pathways Perspective beyond the United States: A Profile of Federal Women Prisoners in Argentina

A large body of knowledge within the criminological discipline has demonstrated that women and girls have distinct social and psychological risk factors that contribute to both their initial onset, and continued engagement, in offending behavior. However, most of this research has focused on U.S. samples of women offenders. Using mixed methods, the current research investigated the offense dynamics and possible risk factors for women’s imprisonment with incarcerated women (246 survey respondents; 12 interviewees) in the Argentine federal penitentiary system. We find that there are some similarities in the characteristics of women prisoners in Argentina and the characteristics of women prisoners in the United States, but also some distinctions, primarily in the prevalence of prior victimization. In addition, our results indicate that federal women prisoners in Argentina who reported serious prior abuse were more likely to have committed crimes against persons in comparison to women without abuse histories. Such a distinction supports the ongoing research investigating women offender profiles beyond U.S. samples.

Sex-Selective Abortion Bans are Not Associated with Changes in Sex Ratios at Birth Among Asian Populations in Illinois and Pennsylvania

Legal prohibitions on sex-selective abortions are proliferating in the United States. Eight state legislatures have banned abortions sought on the basis of the sex of the fetus, 21 states have considered such laws since 2009, and a similar bill is pending in U.S. Congress. These laws have been introduced and enacted without any empirical data about their impact or effectiveness. Prior studies of U.S. Census data found sex ratios among foreign-born Chinese, Korean and Indian immigrants were skewed in favor of boys, but only in families where there were already one or two girls. Using the variation in the timing of bans in Illinois and Pennsylvania as natural experiments, we compare the pre-ban and post-ban sex ratios of certain Asian newborn children in these states over 12-year periods. We then compare these ratios with the sex ratios of Asian newborn children in neighboring states during the same period. We find that the bans in Illinois and Pennsylvania are not associated with any changes in sex ratios at birth among Asians. In Illinois and its neighboring states, the sex ratio at birth of Asian children was not male-biased during our study period. On the other hand, the sex ratio at birth among Asians in Pennsylvania and its neighboring states was skewed slightly in favor of boys, but the enactment of the ban did not normalize the sex ratio. This strongly suggests that sex-selective abortion bans have had no impact on the practice of sex selection, to the extent that it occurs, in these states. This finding is highly relevant to legislative and policy debates in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures where sex-selective abortion laws are being considered.