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This chapter proposes a research strategy for contextualizing legal struggles for human rights in a wider temporal, socio-political, institutional, and dynamic context. Studying the judicialization of matters that were traditionally the domain of public policy is complex, even before taking into account the myriad non-judicial considerations and facilitating or constraining factors that affect processes and outcomes – such as capacity, mobilization, politics, meaning creation, or extra-territorial obligations. The framework presented allows comparative research to proceed in stages, where one phase of data collection answers a set of questions while raising others, and further research addresses new concepts and theoretical concerns. Work of various scholars can thus cumulate iteratively to address complexity in ways that are unfeasible in a single research project.

This introductory chapter presents and elaborates on the main theme of the book – the domestic implementation of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments – and highlights its contribution in the existing body of scholarly research. In advancing an interdisciplinary perspective into the subject, it extends beyond the predominantly legal genre of scholarship to explore the institutional actors involved in it, as a few studies have began to do over the past couple of years. At the same time, this chapter also discusses the need for a for a multifaceted approach that further takes into account and explores the political context and the societal dynamics that influence domestic implementation. The next part of this introductory chapter depicts the basic contours of the Convention's institutional evolution and its enforcement machinery. The third part expounds the methodological and analytical considerations guiding the present set of studies, while the last two parts elaborate on and provide an overview of the two main sections of the book that examine a) the implementation responses of, and interactions among different institutional and governmental actors, and b) the patterns of legal and political mobilisation to pursue different minority-related rights claims vis-à-vis states.

To examine the opportunities and challenges of attempting to secure educational rights through courts, Chapter 4 offers a case study of a landmark school finance lawsuit from Kentucky, Rose v. Council for Better Education.This case is often celebrated as the beginning of the “third wave” of school finance litigation, and it offers important lessons for ongoing school finance reform and for evolving conceptions of what the legal right to education entails. The chapter focuses on an under-analyzed feature of cases like Rose: how moral claims about educational entitlements can inspire citizens to mobilize and support litigation, which in turn can impact judicial outcomes and policy implementation. The chapter considers how particular educational rights claims figured into the Rosecase, and where they converged and diverged with moral claims about educational justice. This focus highlights the interplay between moral and legal conceptions of educational rights, and how the philosophical ideals advanced in the first part of the book may shape rights-based advocacy in practice.

This concluding chapter discusses and analyses the patterns of variation in the domestic implementation of the ECtHR's judgments, as well as the attitudes of national officials, judges and government actors vis-à-vis the ECtHR's case law across and within the different countries under study. The implementation of the ECtHR's judgments and their potential for prompting reform and policy change domestically can be approached through different perspectives, which may also be relevant for understanding compliance with international law more broadly: the political and policy process, a judicial politics perspective, and a social mobilisation perspective. Besides reviewing the findings of the country case studies included in this volume, this chapter outlines and discusses these three perspectives. It ends by reflecting on and briefly discussing the role of the ECHR and the Strasbourg Court in promoting democracy in Europe.