This article proposes a methodology for measuring how deferential judicial reasoning is in
human rights cases. The proposed framework ranks four strategies of exercising deference—
rights definition, standard of justification, burden of justification and cogency of arguments—
along a triadic scale of not deferential, moderately deferential and highly deferential. The
proposed framework is designed for common law jurisdictions that embrace a two-stage
approach to rights adjudication in which courts initially ask whether there has been a prima …