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Why do we witness variation in the level of judicial attention to rights litigation across countries and over time? Traditional explanations emphasize the constitutional recognition of rights, judicial leadership, and the development in society of a sophisticated 'support structure for legal mobilization,' as key covariates of these phenomena. Yet, there is a dearth of quantitative empirical analyses that evaluate these explanations comparatively, and actually test their relative influence on trends of rights litigation and protection. Perhaps the most important lacuna in this regard is an assessment of the influence of institutional conditions and modifications in bringing about or facilitating the transformation of the rights scene. To contribute to closing this gap, this paper assesses the influence of such factors on changes in the presence of rights litigation in the dockets of the High Courts of four established democracies with Common Law systems: Australia, Britain, Canada and the U.S. To this purpose, we perform time series analyses on data from the High Courts Judicial Database (Haynie et. al. 2007), and the Spaeth U.S. Supreme Court Database; along with data from secondary qualitative sources. Our analysis shows that increasing support structures do not account for the full picture, while other covariates -institutional changes and the court's ideological proclivity to take cases involving individual rights - can play a significant and decisive role in certain settings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epp's 'Rights Revolution' theory provides a compelling appraisal of the rise of rights protection in national policy making. He argues that the expansion of rights litigation in the agendas of high courts in four countries -the U.S., England, Canada and India-, results chiefly from the existence of a support structure in society to bring the cases to court, to finance the costs of litigation, and to encourage popular support for an expansion of rights. In this paper we seek to expand Epp's analysis by filling the gap produced by his methodological shortcomings and introducing Australia, Philippines and Mexico into the analysis. The preliminary results discussed in this paper show that one's conclusions about the existence and extent of a rights revolution in these countries can be sensitive to slight data and methodological issues. Further consideration of England and India reflects a picture of rights protection that differs from Epp's in significant respects. Moreover, a look at Australia, The Philippines and Mexico cast doubt on the leverage provided by the rights-support structure hypothesis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]