Download or read book Visions of Judicial Review written by Benjamin Bricker and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Visions of Judicial Review written by Benjamin Bricker and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What factors account for the development and use of judicial review? Under traditional separation of powers theory, courts are supposed to act as an important check on governmental excesses or abuses. Yet, there is little theoretical consensus on how courts make these critical decisions and create opinions - due in part to a lack of broadly comparative testing. My dissertation explores the factors that account for court activism and court independence, focusing on three main visions, or arguments, for judicial review. These visions of judicial review are multi-faceted, yet all in their own way seek to explain whether and how judges are able to create representative rulings that deliver in practical ways the abstract benefits of democratic rule. I then test these visions using data from several newer democracies in Eastern Europe. One vision for judicial review focuses on the ability of judges engaging in judicial review to find the 'right' answer to constitutional questions, based on legal doctrine and jurisprudential principles. This 'legalistic' view fits within a larger rule of law-based vision of democracy, in which the purpose of democratic government is to ensure fair processes and orderly social outcomes within the constraints of the law. A second vision for judicial review focuses on the role of courts as protectors of constitutional rights, particularly the rights of minority groups against majority tyranny. This idea fits within the larger liberal, rights-protecting view of modern democracy, in which the provision and protection of positive individual rights is of paramount concern. A third vision focuses on the potential for judicial review to act as a majoritarian instrument. Majoritarian judicial review may occur for several reasons. First, judges come to the bench with certain ideological beliefs. Rules in most countries place popularly elected leaders in charge of appointing judges to high courts. With these appointment rules, it is unlikely that court opinions with be far from the views of lawmaking majorities. Thus, judicial review might largely serve to legitimate policies enacted by current elected leaders (Dahl 1957), but may also be used to strike non-favored policies (Whittington 2005, 2007; Rogers 2001). Second, courts may respond directly to public opinion, limiting or altering the exercise of judicial review in response to changes in public support for the judiciary (Clark 2011). Third, judges may respond to institutional incentives, like reappointment pressures, that encourage outcomes from judicial review consistent with majority preferences. Using new data from Eastern European democracies, I investigate the implications from these visions of judicial review. In Chapter Three, I investigate several preliminary institutional factors that could influence the exercise of judicial review. Specifically, I find that judicial panels are much more likely to overturn laws when there is an ideological divergence between the court and the law under review. At the same time, the propensity of courts to overturn laws is also greater when government monitoring and oversight agencies refer laws for constitutional review. This second finding suggests a role for strategic decision-making by constitutional courts. Based on the types of cases these courts both hear and overturn, there is also some evidence in favor of a type of 'rights-protecting' judicial review. Chapter Three finds preliminary evidence suggesting the presence of a 'majoritarian' vision of judicial review, one in which judges follow the preferences of the elected leaders who appoint them. Yet, as noted above, there are several different avenues through which majoritarian review can potentially travel. In Chapter Four, I test implications from these different majoritarian visions. Specifically, I examine how macro-level concepts like parliamentary preferences, public support, governmental power, and government coalitions -- variables that fit directly within the majoritarian framework - might influence the exercise of judicial review. The majoritarian vision for judicial review anticipates ideological voting among judges on courts of constitutional review. However, other structural factors may motivate judicial decision-making, as well. Chapter Five investigates whether institutional incentives also influence the choices judges make. Moving from case outcomes to the individual decisions judges make, I examine whether reappointment concerns lead to differentiation in decision-making. I test this theory of career-oriented judging with longitudinal data from three European constitutional courts that vary in their appointment and retention processes. Ultimately, the findings of this chapter show the influence of both career concerns and ideology on judicial decision-making and outcomes. Finally, Chapter Six examines whether the legalist vision of judicial review can help to explain judicial outcomes. Within the legalist vision, judicial review is a normatively desirable rule for democracies due to the ability of judges trained in methods of legal analysis to apply neutral legal principles -- including the rules developed from past cases -- to reach the 'right' legal outcomes and thus ensure the rule of law within society. I test the legalist vision in a wholly new environment: constitutional courts in civil law systems. Using a unique dataset of citations collected from opinions of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal, I find evidence of increasingly sophisticated use of case law, as well as strategic use of precedent to shape the direction of opinions. Overall, results indicate these judges use case citations to provide both legal legitimation for their opinions and strategic advancement of their policy, with little evidence in favor of a legalist vision for judicial review. Using evidence from Eastern European democracies, I have found that several visions of 'majoritarian' judicial review can be used to explain how courts engage in judicial review. At the same time, there is limited evidence that a 'rights-protecting' vision of judicial review is realized in practice, and little evidence to confirm the existence of a pure 'legalist' vision of judicial review. Chapter 3 showed the importance of ideology to judicial decision-making across multiple countries, but also the value to courts of outside actors who can ensure compliance with judicial rulings. Chapter 4 expanded on the majoritarian vision, confirming the value of public opinion and public support to judicial outcomes but also showing that courts are more active in reviewing legislation that may be far from the majority will. Chapter 5 confirmed another aspect of the majoritarian vision - that institutional incentives can influence career-oriented judges to vote in line with the interests of reappointing agents. Finally, Chapter 6 examined the use of precedent among constitutional court judges in civil law systems. Little evidence was found to confirm a legalist vision of judicial decision-making, though there is evidence that judges in the civil law tradition, like their counterparts in the United States, use precedent to advance ideological and strategic goals. Overall, these chapters have shown the importance of ideology and strategic interactions outside of the United States. These two factors are well established among those who study the United States courts, yet relatively few studies have compared the importance of these factors to judicial decision-making across multiple countries. The cross-national perspective taken in this study does just that, and provides an important extension of past empirical work examining the judicial decision-making and the normative role of judicial review in democratic governance.
Download or read book Visions of Judicial Review written by Benjamin Bricker and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book establishes a framework to consider the value of judicial review in modern democracy, grouping answers to this question into one of three main arguments, or 'visions' for judicial review: legalist; rights-protecting; and majoritarian.
Download or read book Visions of Justice written by Paolo Sartori and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of Justice offers an exploration of legal consciousness among the Muslim communities of Central Asia from the end of the eighteenth century through the fall of the Russian Empire. Paolo Sartori surveys how colonialism affected the way in which Muslims formulated their convictions about entitlements and became exposed to different notions of morality. Situating his work within a range of debates about colonialism and law, legal pluralism, and subaltern subjectivity, Sartori puts the study of Central Asia on a broad, conceptually sophisticated, comparative footing. Drawing from a wealth of Arabic, Persian, Turkic and Russian sources, this book provides a thoughtful critique of method and considers some of the contrasting ways in which material from Central Asian archives may most usefully be read. Publication in Open Access was made possible by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation.
Download or read book A Conflict of Visions written by Thomas Sowell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-06-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times) Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.
Download or read book Law and Judicial Duty written by Philip Hamburger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hamburger traces the early history of what is today called “judicial review.” The book sheds new light on a host of misunderstood problems, including intent, the status of foreign and international law, the cases and controversies requirement, and the authority of judicial precedent.
Download or read book The People Themselves written by Larry Kramer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the radical claim that rather than interpreting the Constitution from on high, the Court should be reflecting popular will--or the wishes of the people themselves.
Download or read book Judicial Power written by Christine Landfried and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power of national and transnational constitutional courts to issue binding rulings in interpreting the constitution or an international treaty has been endlessly discussed. What does it mean for democratic governance that non-elected judges influence politics and policies? The authors of Judicial Power - legal scholars, political scientists, and judges - take a fresh look at this problem. To date, research has concentrated on the legitimacy, or the effectiveness, or specific decision-making methods of constitutional courts. By contrast, the authors here explore the relationship among these three factors. This book presents the hypothesis that judicial review allows for a method of reflecting on social integration that differs from political methods, and, precisely because of the difference between judicial and political decision-making, strengthens democratic governance. This hypothesis is tested in case studies on the role of constitutional courts in political transformations, on the methods of these courts, and on transnational judicial interactions.
Download or read book Star Trek Visions of Law and Justice written by Robert H. Chaires and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Star Trek Visions of Law and Justice collects fourteen articles connecting popular media with academic inquiry, illustrating the connections between the future world of Star Trek and current issues in international law, law and justice, and the American legal system. It makes an ideal text to teach students interdisciplinary academic concepts using a familiar, popular media phenomenon.
Download or read book Visions of Self government written by Alexander George Latham and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Law and Leviathan written by Cass R. Sunstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.
Download or read book How Rights Went Wrong written by Jamal Greene and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.
Download or read book Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy written by Keith E. Whittington and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should the Supreme Court have the last word when it comes to interpreting the Constitution? The justices on the Supreme Court certainly seem to think so--and their critics say that this position threatens democracy. But Keith Whittington argues that the Court's justices have not simply seized power and circumvented politics. The justices have had power thrust upon them--by politicians, for the benefit of politicians. In this sweeping political history of judicial supremacy in America, Whittington shows that presidents and political leaders of all stripes have worked to put the Court on a pedestal and have encouraged its justices to accept the role of ultimate interpreters of the Constitution. Whittington examines why presidents have often found judicial supremacy to be in their best interest, why they have rarely assumed responsibility for interpreting the Constitution, and why constitutional leadership has often been passed to the courts. The unprecedented assertiveness of the Rehnquist Court in striking down acts of Congress is only the most recent example of a development that began with the founding generation itself. Presidential bids for constitutional leadership have been rare, but reflect the temporary political advantage in doing so. Far more often, presidents have cooperated in increasing the Court's power and encouraging its activism. Challenging the conventional wisdom that judges have usurped democracy, Whittington shows that judicial supremacy is the product of democratic politics.
Download or read book Comparative Judicial Review written by Erin F. Delaney and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constitutional courts around the world play an increasingly central role in day-to-day democratic governance. Yet scholars have only recently begun to develop the interdisciplinary analysis needed to understand this shift in the relationship of constitutional law to politics. This edited volume brings together leading scholars of constitutional law and politics to provide a comprehensive overview of judicial review, covering theories of its creation, mechanisms of its constraint, and its comparative applications, including theories of interpretation and doctrinal developments. This book serves as a single point of entry for legal scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the field of comparative judicial review in its broader political and social context. This book's comparative and interdisciplinary accounts of a phenomenon of worldwide significance and its advanced introduction to the origins, functions, and contours of judicial review make it both accessible and indispensable. Comparative Judicial Review should be considered essential reading for every graduate student, early career scholar, and constitutional law professor seeking to become more comparative in their approach. Contributors include: K.J. Alter, S.G. Calabresi, W.-C. Chang, E.F. Delaney, R. Dixon, L, Esptein, T. Ginsburg, J. Greene, A. Harel, R. Hirschl, S. Issacharoff, V. Jackson, T. Jacobi, R.A. Kagan, D. Kapiszewski, J. Knight, D. Landau, Y.-L. Lee, H. Lerner, S. Mittal, T. Roux, W. Sadurski, A. Shinar, G. Silverstein, K. Stilt, Y. Tew, M. Versteeg, S. Waheedi, B.R. Weingast, E. Zackin
Download or read book Towards Juristocracy written by Ran Hirschl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In countries and supranational entities around the globe, constitutional reform has transferred an unprecedented amount of power from representative institutions to judiciaries. The constitutionalization of rights and the establishment of judicial review are widely believed to have benevolent and progressive origins, and significant redistributive, power-diffusing consequences. Ran Hirschl challenges this conventional wisdom. Drawing upon a comprehensive comparative inquiry into the political origins and legal consequences of the recent constitutional revolutions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hirschl shows that the trend toward constitutionalization is hardly driven by politicians' genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened political elites, influential economic stakeholders, and judicial leaders. This self-interested coalition of legal innovators determines the timing, extent, and nature of constitutional reforms. Hirschl demonstrates that whereas judicial empowerment through constitutionalization has a limited impact on advancing progressive notions of distributive justice, it has a transformative effect on political discourse. The global trend toward juristocracy, Hirschl argues, is part of a broader process whereby political and economic elites, while they profess support for democracy and sustained development, attempt to insulate policymaking from the vicissitudes of democratic politics.
Download or read book Our Republican Constitution written by Randy E. Barnett and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise history of the long struggle between two fundamentally opposing constitutional traditions, from one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars—a manifesto for renewing our constitutional republic. The Constitution of the United States begins with the words: “We the People.” But from the earliest days of the American republic, there have been two competing notions of “the People,” which lead to two very different visions of the Constitution. Those who view “We the People” collectively think popular sovereignty resides in the people as a group, which leads them to favor a “democratic” constitution that allows the “will of the people” to be expressed by majority rule. In contrast, those who think popular sovereignty resides in the people as individuals contend that a “republican” constitution is needed to secure the pre-existing inalienable rights of “We the People,” each and every one, against abuses by the majority. In Our Republican Constitution, renowned legal scholar Randy E. Barnett tells the fascinating story of how this debate arose shortly after the Revolution, leading to the adoption of a new and innovative “republican” constitution; and how the struggle over slavery led to its completion by a newly formed Republican Party. Yet soon thereafter, progressive academics and activists urged the courts to remake our Republican Constitution into a democratic one by ignoring key passes of its text. Eventually, the courts complied. Drawing from his deep knowledge of constitutional law and history, as well as his experience litigating on behalf of medical marijuana and against Obamacare, Barnett explains why “We the People” would greatly benefit from the renewal of our Republican Constitution, and how this can be accomplished in the courts and the political arena.
Download or read book Democracy and Equality written by Geoffrey R. Stone and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1953 to 1969, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren brought about many of the proudest achievements of American constitutional law. The Warren declared racial segregation and laws forbidding interracial marriage to be unconstitutional; it expanded the right of citizens to criticize public officials; it held school prayer unconstitutional; and it ruled that people accused of a crime must be given a lawyer even if they can't afford one. Yet, despite those and other achievements, conservative critics have fiercely accused the justices of the Warren Court of abusing their authority by supposedly imposing their own opinions on the nation. As the eminent legal scholars Geoffrey R. Stone and David A. Strauss demonstrate in Democracy and Equality, the Warren Court's approach to the Constitution was consistent with the most basic values of our Constitution and with the most fundamental responsibilities of our judiciary. Stone and Strauss describe the Warren Court's extraordinary achievements by reviewing its jurisprudence across a range of issues addressing our nation's commitment to the values of democracy and equality. In each chapter, they tell the story of a critical decision, exploring the historical and legal context of each case, the Court's reasoning, and how the justices of the Warren Court fulfilled the Court's most important responsibilities. This powerfully argued evaluation of the Warren Court's legacy, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Warren Court, both celebrates and defends the Warren Court's achievements against almost sixty-five years of unrelenting and unwarranted attacks by conservatives. It demonstrates not only why the Warren Court's approach to constitutional interpretation was correct and admirable, but also why the approach of the Warren Court was far superior to that of the increasingly conservative justices who have dominated the Supreme Court over the past half-century.
