1 - Introduction

Summary

This chapter introduces the book. It expresses as the book’s principal objective the advancement of a normative argument regarding the judicial enforcement of constitutional social rights. This argument is that the courts, when enforcing these rights against government actors, should focus their analysis on public trust in government or ‘political trust’ – with the book’s proposed trust-based framework following on from this argument. As a starting point for this normative argument, and to address the broader question of why we should examine social rights law from the perspective of political trust, the chapter considers the relationship between political trust and public cooperation. Additionally, the chapter covers preliminary matters, defining the book’s scope, delineating the applicability of the trust-based framework, situating the framework in existing frameworks for social rights enforcement and outlining the book’s structure.