Do Bills of Rights Matter? A Reconsideration of Epp’s Conclusions

Rights and Freedoms. ” It was Epp’s thesis that the profound effects often attributed to the Charter of Rights are substantially over rated. Instead, he argued that bills of rights matter, but “only to the extent that individuals can mobilize the resources necessary to invoke them through strategic litigation. ” He argued that there are reasons to be skeptical that a bill of rights by itself will have much effect on either an increasing presence of rights issues on the agendas of top courts or on judicial support for rights claimants. Instead, he argued for the crucial role of what he called the “support structure ” for rights. He argued that only when there is an adequate support structure for rights will courts participate in a “rights revolution.” In the analysis below, we take advantage of an extensive dataset on the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada to provide a more systematic test of Epp’s thesis. Instead of relying solely on a visual display of seven data points, we present a three part analysis. First, we make a visual examination of trends in the Court’s agenda covering every year from 1946 to 2005. Next, we create an ordinal measure to capture the essence of Epp’s concept of a “support structure ” for rights and test its effects on changing Cour