"Negative" Rights vs. "Positive" Entitlements: A Comparative Study of Judicical Interpretations of Rights in an Emerging Neo-Liberal Economic Order

Abstract

The constitutionalization of rights has recently become a booming industry. More than eighty countries and several supra-national entities have engaged in fundamental constitutional reform over the past three decades. Significantly, nearly every recently adopted constitution or constitutional revision contains a bill of rights and establishes some form of active judicial review. 1 [End Page 1060] Despite the fact that judicial power has recently been expanded in many countries through the constitutional entrenchment of rights and the establishment of judicial review, few comparative studies have been undertaken to empirically assess the de facto interpretation given by national high courts of the newly enacted constitutional rights.