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Acontextual Judicial Review, Louis Michael Seidman

Louis Michael Seidman

Is constitutional judicial review a necessary component of a just polity? A striking feature of the current debate is its tendency to proceed as if the question could be answered in the same way always and everywhere. Defenders of constitutional review argue that is a conceptually necessary feature of constitutionalism, the rule of law, and the effective protection of individual rights. Critics claim that it is necessarily inconsistent with progressive politics and democratic engagement. Largely missing from the debate is a fairly obvious point: Like any other institution, constitutional review must be evaluated within a particular temporal, cultural, and political …