Katharine Young (Boston College – Law School) has posted The Separation of Powers and Social Rights on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The separation of powers and social rights are interdependent concepts – each reshapes the other in both theory and practice. The separation of powers principle informs constitutional social rights interpretation, especially by courts addressing the boundaries of their ability to adjudicate claims of state infringement of guaranteed rights to social security, health care, education, housing, food, and other material and environmental protections. In turn, the presence of constitutional social rights informs contemporary understandings of the separation of powers, supporting functionalist or relational, over formalist, accounts of separated or divided powers. This chapter tracks these conceptual synergies and tensions through two constitutionalist debates-the justiciability of social rights complaints and the role of fourth branch/guarantor institutions. Such debates, although emblematic of the concerns of the so-called ‘transformative Constitutions’ of the Global South, are increasingly salient for Global North constitutional democracies. They suggest that ‘juristocracy’ and executive tyranny, two dangers that separation of powers concepts ostensibly address, may themselves be a byproduct of social rights deprivation in the modern state. To be published in the Cambridge Handbook on Separation of Powers.
Very interesting and recommended.