Abstract:
The disclosure on fundamental rights from
a socio-legal point of view has been a somewhat recent
development. According to this school of thought rights
are seen as a friction that exist among the members of a
society where they are constantly making claims to enhance
their respective rights. Socio-legal perspective looks at
the sociological factors, such as gender, religion, economic
status, culture, ethnography and the social interactions of
the parties in general when they live in a communi-ty and
how these interactions represents the virtues and values of
a community. The Sri Lankan ex-perience has shown that
with its developments of the Constitutional Jurisprudence
‘Fundamental rights’ plays a very important role in the
develop-ment of a society. For a long time, that is to say
till 1978 none of the Sri Lankans enjoyed justiciable
fundamental rights. Even the justiciable rights granted
under the 1978 constitution was hampered severely with
the restrictions and the restrictive in-terpretations that
were given to them. The constitu-tion and the judiciary
has therefore, acted as a barrier at times against the wishes
of society. How-ever, these barriers that have been so
created has at times urged the legislature and especially
the judiciary to take a more liberal viewpoint with re-gard
to these fundamental rights when people have tried to
vindicate them. From a socio-legal back-ground we can
see that both the law shapes society and vice versa. Still
due to the differences that exist among the institutions
and those who are re-sponsible for interpreting the law,
people have been unable to enjoy the fundamental rights
guaranteed under the constitution to the fullest. There
for it is suggested that when implementing restrictions
up-on fundamental rights granted under a constitu-tion,
a through consultation must be made with the members
of the society and then after one should decide on the
scope and the ambit of the re-strictions which are going
to be placed upon the fundamental rights. Therefore,
it becomes very important to look at the matter from a
sociological perspective.
