ABSTRACT
Social and economic rights (SER) adjudication is an ever more common feature of rights-protecting democracies. Yet democratic concerns continue to be expressed: the threat of a judicialized politics, a politicized judiciary, co-opted claimants, distorted markets, and other (real and imagined) challenges. These concerns are raised within jurisdictions that have not yet entrenched SER and those in which SER are explicitly justiciable. Scholars seeking to address, or at least quiet, such concerns often explore the realworld examples of SER justiciability in South Africa, India, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and other jurisdictions discussed in this book. Another approach is to examine new ways of theorizing the models of democratic representation and separation of powers implicit in these criticisms and to test these new models against comparative experience. This chapter examines the promise of the approach of “democratic experimentalism”.
