comprising all of these aspects taken together will have on the life prospects of various individuals. Of course specific public policy prescriptions will focus on particular topics; they will not themselves be holistic. And claims of socioeconomic rights are like them in this regard. So we may say that the socioeconomic rights represent-or are very close to-policy outputs, and that a mistake has been made in this Article by comparing them to principles of justice that are not identifiable with output prescriptions in the same way. That is fair as far as it goes. The trouble is that claims of right often present themselves not just as specific policy demands but as each sitting on its own bottom, so to speak, with its own separate foundations. Rights present themselves as separable in their formulation and in their foundations. Just as the principle of free speech is justified in a way that is quite separate from, say, the right not to be tortured, the idea is that Article 11 of the ICESCR will have its own justification, Article 12 will have a somewhat different justification, and so on. Each right stands on its own and demands attention. In that regard, rights differ quite radically from the policy prescriptions that emerge from the application of a theory of justice like Rawls's theory. Superficially they may resemble one another. But what the Rawlsian theory generates regarding what is required in the way of, say, education will emerge from a process in which both the competition between education and other demands on resources and the relation between education and other arrangements' impact on people's life prospects have been properly considered together. That is unlikely to be true of the socioeconomic rights. Let me emphasize that I do not rule out the possibility that some claims that are both particular and more or less absolute may emerge from a theory of justice. (We considered this in Part V.) Maybe elementary education, for example, is so important in and of itself to children's life prospects that even taking into account other impacts and other demands that compete for the same resources, it must emerge in its own right as an uncompromising demand. That is certainly a possibility and-I am saying-that is the way to establish that there are socioeconomic rights. Just consulting a list is not. Turning now to the institutional context, we might note that one advantage of working through these issues in the context of a theory of justice is that it postpones as long as possible commitment to any particular political or institutional process. Introducing the language of rights tends to tilt matters decisively towards judicial rather than legislative or executive processes. In many political systems, rights are entrusted as a matter of course to courts for administration or enforcement. It is true that sometimes legislation may be devoted to a scheme for the implementation of people's rights: one thinks of the Civil Rights Acts in 804