Michel Rosenfeld (Yeshiva University – Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law) has posted Innovation in Pursuit of Constitutional Justice: The Global North Compared to the Global South, Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2026-10 on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Liberal democratic constitutions ought to guarantee a minimum of distributive justice alongside three separate dimensions: material welfare redistribution; identitarian recognition; and democratic representation. I have referred to the minimum in question as the “justice essentials”. This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting how pursuit of the justice essentials has fared respectively in the Global North and the Global South, and on whether innovations in the said pursuit crafted in one hemisphere are suited for transplant or influence in the other hemisphere.
In order to be in a position to address this last question thoroughly, the paper first considers certain pertinent key general concerns relating to North/South comparisons. Are the justice essentials challenges and objectives the same throughout the globe, but the constitutional aspirations different in the North and the South? Are both the challenges and the solutions different? Or else, is the North/South dichotomy at best of secondary importance as salient differences prove ultimately due to contrasting legal cultures, divergent material conditions, and competing ideological commitments?
There are no straightforward answers to these questions. Nevertheless, helpful guidance can be obtained from the realization that the justice essentials confronts more similarities than differences in the context of material redistribution; more differences than similarities in that of identitarian recognition; and a rough equivalence in that of democratic representation.
The paper then analyzes two areas in which the constitutional jurisprudence of the Global South has produced innovations that have (or ought to have) had influence in the Global North. These are: social welfare rights and the rights of nature. The first of these pertains to material redistribution, the second to a combination of material redistribution and identitarian recognition.
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