Introduction

How is the provision of rights affected by indeterminate legislation? This chapter will describe how indeterminacies in anti-discrimination and equality laws have undermined the effectiveness of policy. Specifically, rights are increasingly couched in language that allows their interpretations to be stretched, narrowed and entirely reimagined. Effects have included the only partial realisation of policy goals. In addition to which has been reliance, in the face of indeterminacy, on well-worn practices. In other words, despite the desire to effect ambitious policy change with regards to equality, indeterminacies in law have enabled only modest changes and have encouraged the courts to take a safe, conservative approach to interpreting the content of rights. Drawing on the opening quotes, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights is tasked with ‘encouraging and supporting the development of a society in which people's ability to achieve their potential is not limited by prejudice or discrimination’. Given the indeterminacy of this language, the default approach to rights is to rely on notions of equality that are well established, as being in Jeffrey Jowell's words, ‘constitutive of democracy’. There is a desire to achieve significant change in the provision of rights, but this is frustrated by the unclear exposition of what rights exist and how they may be enjoyed.