The Social Constitution: Embedding Social Rights Through Legal Mobilization
Forthcoming in the Cambridge Studies on Law and Society series with Cambridge University Press

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​​The Social Constitution examines the conditions under which new constitutional rights become meaningful, moving from parchment promises to constraining institutions. This book introduces the concept of “embedding” constitutional law, which clarifies how particular visions of law come to take root both socially and legally. One way that constitutional embedding occurs is through legal mobilization, as citizens understand the law in some way or another and make legal claims—or choose not to—on the basis of that understanding, and as judges decide whether and how to respond to legal claims. These interactions ultimately construct the content and strength of the constitutional order. When constitutions are robustly embedded, they can weather significant challenges, including 1) limits of legal legibility, or what and whose problems are intelligible to the law, 2) overt efforts to unravel rights protections by political actors who view constitutionalism as a threat to their power, and 3) the difficulty of keeping up with the daily work that underpins any legal order. The book focuses on the Colombian constitution of 1991, and it draws on over one year of fieldwork across Colombia and multiple sources of data, including semi-structured interviews, original surveys, legal documents, and participation observation.

Find the book here.