What does the right to the continuous improvement of living conditions in Article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights really mean and how can it contribute to social change? The book explores how this underdeveloped right can have valuable application in response to global problems of poverty, inequality and climate destruction, through an in-depth consideration of its meaning.
The book seeks to interpret and give meaning to the right as a legal standard, giving it practical value for those whose living conditions are inadequate. It locates the right within broader philosophical and political debates, whilst also assessing the challenges to its realisation. It also explores how the right relates to human rights more generally and considers its application to issues of gender, care and the rights of Indigenous peoples. The contributors deeply probe the meaning of 'living conditions', suggesting that these encompass more than the basic rights to housing, water, food, and clothing. The chapters provide a range of doctrinal, historical and philosophical engagements through grounded analysis and imaginative interpretation.
With a foreword by Sandra Liebenberg (former Member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), the book includes chapters from renowned and emerging scholars working across disciplines from around the world.
Jessie Hohmann is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She is an internationally recognised expert on the right to housing in international law. Her research also engages with the material culture, objects and materiality of international law, and with Indigenous Peoples and international law.
Jessie's 2013 monograph The Right to Housing: Law, Concepts, Possibilities (Hart) was shortlisted for the Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Before joining UTS, she was Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, University of London (2012-2019) and held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2009-2012).
Rosemary Hunter FacSS is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Founding Head of Law at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. She is a feminist socio-legal scholar with particular interests in family law and family justice processes, judging and the judiciary, and access to justice. She has published widely on these topics in both Australia (where she began her academic career) and the UK. With Anne Barlow, she was a member of the ESRC-funded Mapping Paths to Family Justice project, which resulted in their prize-winning book, Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neoliberal Times (Barlow, Hunter, Smithson and Ewing, 2017). Rosemary has been the Academic Member of the Family Justice Council since 2016 and leads the Council's Domestic Abuse Working Group. She is also a member of the Private Law Working Group and the Ministry of Justice's Expert Panel on Harm in the Family Courts. She is a former Chair of the SLSA and a former Council member of JUSTICE.
Beth Goldblatt is Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia and Visiting Professor of the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She works in the areas of feminist legal theory, equality and discrimination law, comparative constitutional law, transitional justice, disability, family law, and human rights with a focus on economic and social rights, and the right to social security in particular.
Prior to joining UTS, she held positions at the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney and the University of the Witwatersrand. She is admitted as an attorney in South Africa and worked for many years on human rights litigation, research and advocacy at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand.
David Nelken is Professor of Comparative and Transnational Law and past Vice-Dean for Research at King's College London, UK. Widely published in sociology of law and in criminology, he has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the International Sociological Association, and the (USA) Law and Society Association. He has twice been a Trustee of the LSA and Vice-President of the RSCL.
