Law and Society: International Human Rights, Law and Development, and Access to Justice

The mid-twentieth century saw the emergence of international human rights law as a distinct and increasingly influential body of norms, catalysed above all by the atrocities of the Second World War and the founding of the United Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), drafted by a committee that included Eleanor Roosevelt and the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik, and to which the Indian delegate Hansa Mehta contributed the crucial change from 'all men are created equal' to 'all human beings are born free and equal', proclaimed a set of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights intended to apply universally, though it was initially only a non-binding declaration rather than a treaty.

Binding international human rights law developed through subsequent treaties, most importantly the twin 1966 covenants — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) — which together with the UDHR form the 'International Bill of Rights'. Regional systems developed alongside the global framework, including the European Court of Human Rights (the most judicially developed and binding regional system), the Inter-American human rights system, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, each reflecting distinct regional priorities, such as the African Charter's inclusion of collective 'peoples' rights' alongside individual rights, reflecting post-colonial African emphasis on self-determination and group solidarity.

The 'law and development' movement, emerging in the 1960s primarily from American legal academics working with USAID-funded programmes in Latin America and Asia, sought to export American-style legal institutions and legal education as a supposed precondition for economic modernisation; the movement's own leading scholars later declared it a substantial failure in a famous 1974 self-critique by David Trubek and Marc Galanter, arguing it had naively assumed law's autonomy from politics and underestimated how legal transplants interact unpredictably with local social structures. This critique reshaped subsequent development scholarship toward more contextually grounded approaches, including the 'legal empowerment of the poor' framework promoted by bodies like the UN Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (2008), which emphasises property rights, labour rights, and access to justice for informal-sector and marginalised populations rather than top-down institutional transplantation.

Access to justice remains one of the most persistent gaps between formal legal rights and lived reality worldwide, and nowhere more starkly than in countries with severe judicial backlogs. India's courts faced a pendency of over 40 million cases across all levels by the early 2020s, with undertrial prisoners — those awaiting trial, often for years, without conviction — comprising a majority of the country's prison population, a problem the Supreme Court itself addressed in Hussainara Khatoon (1979) by recognising a constitutional right to speedy trial, though systemic delay has proven far more resistant to judicial remedy than doctrinal recognition alone can achieve.

Legal sociologists including Marc Galanter (whose seminal 1974 essay 'Why the Haves Come Out Ahead' analysed how repeat litigants with resources systematically outperform one-shot, under-resourced litigants in adversarial legal systems) and, in the Indian context, Upendra Baxi have argued that formal legal equality often masks deep structural inequality in who can actually access, navigate, and benefit from legal institutions — a gap partially addressed in India through mechanisms like Lok Adalats (informal dispute-resolution forums), legal aid clinics mandated under the Legal Services Authorities Act (1987), and village-level Nyaya Panchayats, though scholars continue to debate how effectively these alternative mechanisms serve genuinely marginalised litigants versus merely reducing court backlog.

Understanding law sociologically — as an institution embedded in and shaped by social power, not merely a neutral technical system — connects back to the jurisprudential debates opening this course: legal realists and critical scholars would argue that access-to-justice gaps are not incidental failures of an otherwise just system but predictable outcomes of how legal institutions actually distribute power in practice, a perspective essential for any historically and socially grounded understanding of what law does in the world, as opposed to what it formally claims to do.