A significant and increasing body of public law scholarship examines whether and how courts shape social reform efforts. Gerald Rosenberg (The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? [1991]) questions the capacity of courts to produce significant reform in the absence of support from other branches of government and in the face of resistance from the public. Michael McCann (Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization [1994]) develops a model of legal rights mobilization that emphasizes how the deployment of rights discourse and litigation provide important resources for generating social activism. Charles Epp (The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective [2003]) argues that expanding protection for individual rights owes to the development of certain key support structures. While numerous others have joined this research enterprise, the inquiries, with some exceptions (e.g., Austin Sarat and Stuart Schiengold, Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era [2001]), tend to focus on the United States and western industrial democracies, and to treat political rights rather than social and economic rights. Important as this research is, it has been somewhat slow to expand beyond U.S. borders, and even slower to explore the developing world and the mobilization of legal claims to social and economic rights (SE rights).

As the title suggests, Courting Social Justice: Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World targets this void. In an adept collaborative effort, Varun Gauri, Daniel M. Brinks, and several contributing authors examine “the desirability of using courts to enforce social and economic rights” (p. 4). They accomplish this task through empirical studies of legal mobilization in five countries—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa. The country studies treat two policy areas, the right to health (and health care) and the right to education, with contributing authors investigating policy “legalization,” that is, the extent to which courts, legal actors, and legal concepts become relevant in policy design and implementation. Each empirical chapter takes up the conditions under which legalization occurs and investigates the direct and indirect impact of this legalization on policy making and the delivery of rights.

The detailed, well-documented, and distinctive country studies offer rich empirical accounts in their own right. Bookended by the editors' efforts to explain the role and impact of legal actors and institutions in the development of SE rights, the country chapters work to both expose diverse legal landscapes and uncover the circumstances that give rise to legalization. On the one hand, individual rights claims are favored over collective ones, courts are more responsive to those with resources, and while courts tend to emphasize the particular over the universal, they sometimes serve as catalysts for indirect social reform. On the other hand, the editors caution against seeing more uniformity in legalization than there actually is. Courts are, in some of the studied countries, hostile to rights claims. In others, receptiveness to SE rights varies by policy area.

Taken together, the country studies show, according to the editors, that “legalization of social and economic rights is neither an unambiguous pathway to social equity nor an illegitimate betrayal of popular democratic processes and outcomes” (p. 34). Still, and for both “good and ill,” “judicial enforcement is already part of the imaginary of social activists, awaiting only the right conditions to make its presence felt” (p. 303). Moreover, as the editors argue in their concluding chapter, the country studies suggest that under certain conditions the impact of legalization is significant, notwithstanding weak judicial institutions and socioeconomic rights. Indeed, seen through a certain lens, the achievements of the courts “appear downright impressive” (p. 303).

Out of the array of data gathered by the contributing authors, and variation notwithstanding, the volume concludes that litigation for SE rights and judicial involvement in policy development can serve as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, democratic processes. However, the effectiveness of SE rights deployment is constrained, capable of generating significant reform only “when a positive balance on the litigant calculus is coupled with positive state, social and political conditions: (a) a well-developed policy infrastructure with latent capacity … , (b) a constituency on the particular issue with substantial legal capacity, and (c) substantial support for the claims being made from politically consequential actors, either governmental or social” (p. 306). In elaborating this conclusion, the editors distinguish the findings from, among others, empirical work that asserts the need for civil society support structures as prerequisites for legalization.

Unexplored in this review, though not to be overlooked by readers, are the individual and valuable contributions of each country chapters. The specific accounts and findings add unique insights to the existing research on legal mobilization and impact. Each is worthy of comment that is beyond the confines of this review. But while these pieces stand strong on their own, what is most notable about this volume is the overall theory-building effort it presents through effective execution of a comparative analysis.

Edited volumes often suffer from a lack of cohesion, and one of the marks of a successful volume is the presentation of a unified framework that binds the individual pieces together. On this count, “Courting Social Justice” is successful indeed. A shared research framework is elaborated by the editors in the introductory chapter, applied by the contributing authors in the country chapters, and woven together in a concluding chapter. The product of this collaboration is a book that reads far more like a monograph than an edited volume.

There are some limits to what the editors and authors have accomplished in their endeavors to expand theories of legalization and draw conclusions about the impact of SE rights mobilization. The challenge of generalizing—though hardly unique to this volume—is complicated by the emphasis on context and by the multiple factors and conditions that arguably influence the impact of courts. What's more, as cautious as the editors' optimism about the law is, the volume concludes with somewhat more hopefulness than may be warranted by the empirical evidence. In the end, the volume is far more suggestive than conclusive, in part because of the developing nature of the judicial systems and SE rights under review. As Florian F. Hoffmann and Fernando R.N.M. Bentes say in their chapter on Brazil, “In all, social rights litigation is currently in a process of transition and may change considerably over the next couple of years” (p. 145). And as Chidi Anselm Odinkalu forthrightly admits in his country study, “Nigerian jurisprudence on economic and social rights is at best episodic, sparse, and incoherent” (p. 219), and while potential exists to encourage the implementation of SE rights, “[w]hether or not this potential is fully optimized will depend in part on the future political and institutional evolution of Nigeria” (p. 223).

These limitations notwithstanding, the editors do well in their concluding chapter to provide a cogent examination of the findings from the country studies. Brinks and Guari seek to explain the variability in legal mobilization and articulate the conditions under which mobilization is likely to have an impact. Cognizant of the volume's suggestiveness, the editors judiciously highlight implications that are worthy of further study and that should be considered by those interested in understanding how courts figure into social reform.