Giving Legal Substance to the Social Minimum

Abstract

There are complex design issues to be addressed before the legal protection of socio-economic rights can play a meaningful role in supplementing other policy levers in securing adequate access to the social minimum. This chapter focuses on one specific, if key, design challenge – namely how to ensure that legal tests designed to identify breaches of SER are sufficiently clear, determinate and demanding to play a useful role in protecting access to the social minimum.