Direcve Principles of Social Policy: between rights and polics? Dr David Kenny Trinity College Dublin Social Equality at Stake Public Conference, University of Göngen June, 2019 In my presentaon today, I plan to speak about the problems that social equality poses for constuonalism and the different failures, in Ireland and India, of a unique means of trying to address this problem: Direcve Principles of Social or State Policy. Social equality is a something of a bête noire of constuonal law, asking quesons of the discipline to which there are no easy answers, dividing the adherents of our discipline as to how to respond. A substanal number of our colleagues would be happy to say that social equality is, for the most part, out of our hands and beyond our grasp, a maer of polics and policy, with lile to do with law and lawyers. Rights and law are concerned with the civil and polical, which create the freedom, and the tools, to shape the social, but we do not seek to shape them directly. Others are deeply crical of this outlook, arguing that rights and law deeply shape the social, whether we admit it or not, and the failure of constuonal law to take social equality seriously has real and negave effects. Samuel Moyn, in his book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, argues that the fixaon on rights discourse as human kind’s highest ideals, and the exclusion of social equality from this discourse, has led to a neglect of social and economic jusce in the polics of the 21 st century. These camps largely — though not enrely — map on to debates about judicial power and competence. Concerns about the legimacy of judicial review and the capacity of judges to weigh in on contested policy decisions are said to be heightened in the realm of social equality, where what is at stake tends to be more about broad policy, potenally more 1