1125 | Socio-economic Rights

This course is an elective course that will explore the possibilities and challenges of realising socioeconomic rights through the text of the Constitution. Students will be exposed to the varied and creative ways in which constitutional courts across the world have dealt with such rights and the lessons they hold for India.

With the COVID-19 pandemic having upended the lives of millions, and given the fragility of world economies, the debate over the urgent need to guarantee socioeconomic rights has gained increasing importance. This course will enable students to gain a thorough understanding of such rights from an intellectual, theoretical, and comparative perspective.

Students will also critically engage with the resistance that socioeconomic rights receive in contemporary legal and political theory to better understand the unique path that India has charted out for herself when it comes to such rights.

The primary tools used in this course will be a wide-ranging body of scholarly literature as well as judicial decisions both from India as well as from several other jurisdictions across the world.

The course will consist of a seminar style class room discussion with a mix of the Socratic method. At the end of the course, students will be expected to write a research paper out of a set of topics allocated to them.

The layout of the course will involve a general discussion of the topic for each session, followed by an analysis of the relevant judicial decisions and scholarly literature, coupled with intervals where students are expected to present their own analysis and comments.