Giving individual remedies in social rights litigation their due
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As courts enforce socio-economic rights, reliance on individualized relief continues to be controversial. These remedies risk rewarding individuals for their ‘sharp elbows’, while ignoring others who suffer from similar deprivations. They can undermine the integrity of priority-setting schemes for distributing resources, and they can encourage inefficient public spending. Worse still, these orders can have the effect of starving social programs which support the vulnerable. More generally, this form of relief can neglect the need for structural change, and may fail to promote truly transformative constitutionalism. In the face of these criticisms, this article attempts to give individual remedies in socio-economic rights litigation their due. It develops a framework that identifies three spaces in which individualized relief is warranted. First, individual remedies can compensate for implementation gaps in public policy and administrative disfunction. Second, weak-form engagement orders can promote greater rights awareness and special attention for individuals experiencing poverty. Third, individual remedies can provide urgent relief from unreasonable priority-setting schemes. These remedial paths challenge conventional accounts of the judicial role by positioning judges to be more sensitive to their orders’ distributive implications. The article then theorizes the individual remedy’s contributions to the broader project of transformative constitutionalism. It stresses that when coupled with a democratization of legal procedure, individual orders can offer more timely and effective relief than complex, structural remedies. Individualized relief can also catalyze broader policy and administrative reform. Last, individual remedies can set the stage for structural remedies that would otherwise prove too daunting or provocative.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".