Trust, Courts and Social Rights A Trust-Based Framework for Social Rights Enforcement Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law Series

Trust, Courts and Social Rights proposes an innovative legal framework for judicially enforcing social rights that is rooted in public trust in government or 'political trust'. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book draws on theoretical and empirical scholarship on the concept of trust across disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, psychology and political theory. It integrates that scholarship with the relevant public law literature on social rights, fiduciary political theory and judicial review. In doing so, the book uses trust as an analytical lens for social rights law ? importing ideas from the scholarship on trust into the social rights literature ? and develops a normative argument that contributes to the controversial debate on how courts should enforce social rights. Also global in focus, the book uses cases from courts in Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America to illustrate how the trust-based framework operates in practice.

1. Introduction; 2. Conceptualising trust in the social rights context; 3. The citizen-government relationship in a network of trust relationships; 4. A trust-based framework for enforcing social rights?; 5. The expectation of goodwill; 6. The expectation of competence; 7. The expectation of fiduciary responsibility; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

David Vitale is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, School of Law. He holds law degrees from the UK (London School of Economics and Political Science), the US (New York University) and Canada (Osgoode Hall Law School), and a degree in psychology (University of Toronto). He has also worked as a judicial clerk in Canada and Israel, held various research positions globally and practised as a litigator in Canada.