Suchergebnisse

Comparative scholarship on judicial review has paid a lot of attention to the causal impact of politics on judicial decision-making. However, the slower-moving, macro-social process through which judicial review influences societal conceptions of the law/politics relation is less well understood. Drawing on the political science literature on institutional change, The Politico-Legal Dynamics of Judicial Review tests a typological theory of the evolution of judicial review regimes - complexes of legitimating ideas about the law/politics relation. The theory posits that such regimes tend to conform to one of four main types - democratic or authoritarian legalism, or democratic or authoritarian instrumentalism. Through case studies of Australia, India, and Zimbabwe and a comparative chapter analyzing ten additional societies, the book then explores how actually-existing judicial review regimes transition between these types. This process of ideational development, Roux concludes, is distinct both from the everyday business of constitutional politics and changes to the formal constitution.

2 A conceptual framework for assessing the performance of constitutional courts2.1 Two forms of constraint; 2.2 Four central cases; 2.3 Judge-driven changes to a court' s position on the matrix; 2.4 Constitutional courts in new and old democracies; 2.5 The success of constitutional courts in interdisciplinary law/politics terms; 3 Operationalising the conceptual framework to explain the Court ́s achievement; 3 .1 The Court ́s starting position on the matrix; 3.1.1 The vertical axis: South African legal-professional culture.

Interdisciplinary research in comparative constitutional law and politics is often talked about but rarely theorized or practised. And yet, such research is urgently required to meet the complex problems posed by the rise of populist constitutionalism and the endurance of other forms of authoritarian governance. Against this background, this article examines the potential for productive interdisciplinary dialogue between positive political science and legal-doctrinal and normative approaches to constitutional judicial decision-making. While research in this area is founded on a wide range of epistemologies and methods, the article argues, there are at least two areas in which interdisciplinary dialogue might both promote more rigorous research and deliver practical benefits. The first involves greater use of quantitative social science methods in comparative doctrinal research; and the second, the mutual challenging of settled assumptions as between normative constitutional theorists and positive political scientists involved in comparative research on (1) the determinants of judicial behaviour and (2) the link between constitutional judicial decision-making and various non-case outcomes

This paper provides a comparative perspective on judicial review in Indonesia after the establishment of the Constitutional Court in 2003. It starts by retelling the well-known story of the "transformation of American law" over the first half of the last century. As narrated by Morton Horwitz, that story is about how nineteenth-century industrialisation processes destabilised the premises of "Classical Legal Thought", and then about how the legal realist movement exploited the ensuing crisis to transform the way Americans think about law and its relationship to other social systems. Mining this story for generalisable concepts, the paper argues that the establishment of strong-form judicial review necessarily draws on and, in turn, influences prevailing conceptions of legal and political authority. These conceptions vary along a continuum, in the first case, from public confidence in law's autonomy to a conception of law as deeply immersed in politics, and, in the second case, from a conception of legitimate political authority as contingent on a fairly won democratic mandate to a conception of political authority as residing in the power holder's capacity to promote important social goals, such as national security or economic prosperity. Each of these variables may change independently of the other. In certain situations, however, they may also combine to form a relatively stable judicial review regime – a hegemonic legitimating ideology in which conceptions of legal and political authority lock into and mutually support each other. The fourth section uses this conceptual framework to assess the Indonesian Constitutional Court's approach to its mandate after 2003. Under its first two chief justices, the paper notes, the Court engaged in a concerted effort to build public understanding of its legitimate role in national politics. The Court's abrupt switch between its first Chief Justice, Jimly Asshiddiqie's legalist conception of law's authority and his successor, Mohammad Mahfud's more instrumentalist conception, however, has impeded the consolidation of a determinate judicial review regime. Given the considerable threats still confronting Indonesia's democracy, this situation is worrisome. The Court urgently needs to present a coherent account of its legitimate claim to authority if it is to continue playing an effective role.