obligations to desist from unlawful evictions, when homelessness may result – can raise issues of complexity, such as how, and in what form, alternative accommodation should be provided. For Julian Rivers, the intensity of review can be shifted, between stronger and weaker, and more or less deferential forms of proportionality analysis, according to the “seriousness of the infringement” at issue.113 But how is this seriousness to be determined by a court? Here, proportionality analysis runs out. For if courts do take economic and social rights seriously – and inquire into the dignity, equality, or freedom harms caused by the failure to secure basic needs or capabilities – then deference would immediately be put to one side, forcing the courts into a rigorous and searching proportionality analysis. More likely, as current evidence suggests, courts will revert to recognizing “propertybased” or “equality” based assessments of seriousness, which are more cognizable to them, rather than attempt to accord due weight to the inevitable dignity harms that are experienced by those living in poverty or other forms of vulnerability.114 We might well accept judicial deference, via the margin of appreciation or other containment doctrines, or via the standard of reasonableness, under traditional separation 113 Julian Rivers, Proportionality and Variable Intensity of Review, 65 CAMBRIDGE L. J. 174 (2006). An interesting outcome of this tendency to judge seriousness through available categories is the middle class bias that flows from according less deference in such cases. Compare, for example, the South African Constitutional Court’s refusal to recognize a right to water for Soweto residents who were unable to pay, with its recognition of a right to electricity for those who had paid but were disconnected: Mazibuko, supra note 96, with Joseph v. City of Johannesburg 2010 (4) SA 55 (CC). Others too have suggested that such rights can “degenerate into consumer rights that are hijacked by the middle and upper classes”: e.g., Daniel M. Brinks & Varun Gauri, Human Rights as Demands for Communicative Action, 20 J. POL. PHIL. 407, 409 (2012). 114 27