116 THE YALE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW [Vol. 33: 113 and social rights framework. 13 At base, these critics take two skeptical positions—that “universality” in the clai ms of differentially situated people is an impossible goal, and that contextua lized claims, advanced locally, are too complex to be addressed by the discou rse and institutions of rights. With predictions of judicial overreach at th e national level and juridical confusion at the international level, 14 these skeptics counsel abandonment of the minimum core. This Article offers the conceptual steps to ward a second, le ss defeatist, response. It ar gues that the r ejection of the minimum core concept, or its alternate embrace, is avail able only on the basis of a cl earer analysis of its interpretation. Without this clarity, the concept cannot supply a predetermined content to economic and soci al rights, rank the value of particular claims, or set the level and criteria of state ju stification required for a permissible infringement. Indeed, I suggest that it is unlikel y that the concept will ever offer the relative determinacy required for these three tests. Yet it can assist as an object of interpretive agreement— or disagreement—around claims for socioeconomic protection. What must be discarded, perhaps, are the goals of fixture, closure, and determinacy structured into the concept by its advocates. In making this inquiry, it is necess ary to disentangle the inconsistencies and controversies that have s o far accompanied the concept. These are currently hidden to observers, who ar e (all too) content to confine their analysis to eit her international or constitutional law, but r arely both or, alternatively, restrict their observation to either the nor mative or the institutional problematic. This Ar ticle seeks to end the confusion by examining and reconceptua lizing the foundations of the various approaches underlying the commentary on the mini mum core. In Parts II th rough IV, it disaggregates three major approaches and evaluate s them se parately. The plurality and contestation around thes e three approaches have blurred the rationales and justifications of the mi nimum core and produced many of the difficulties in its operation. Finally, in Part V, the Article turns to address these operations more explicitly. The first approach, examined in Part II, locates the minimum core in the essential minimum and i s commonly used by t hose seeking an abs olute foundation for economic and social right s. This approach reaches for a moral standard for prescribing the most pr omising content to the minimum core, such as how the liberal values of human dignity, equality, and freedom, or how the more technical measure of basic needs are minimally sustained within core formulations of rights. Despite its familiarity to constitutionalists and internationalists (existing in harmon y, not dissonance, between the two fields),15 this explicitly normative exercise is potentially the most paradoxical. 13. See, e.g., ERIKA DE WET, THE CONSTITUTIONAL ENFORCEABILITY OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS 96 (1996); Lehmann, supra note 6; Mark Tushnet, Social Welfare Rights and the Forms of Judicial Review, 82 TEX. L. REV. 1895, 1904 (2004) [hereinafter Tushnet, Social Welfare Rights]. 14. Tara Melish, Rethinking the “Less as More” Thesis: Sup ranational Litigation of the Economic, Social, and Cultural R ights in the Am ericas, 39 N.Y.U. J. I NT’L L. & POL. 171, 177-78 n.13 (2006) (describing the difficulties of an abstract “minimum core” guiding concrete litigation). 15. Gerald L. Neuman, Human Rights and Constitutional Rights: Harmony and Dissonance , 55 STAN. L. REV. 1863, 1868-69 (2003) (describing the methodological difference between human rights law and other areas of public international law).