Human Rights And Judicial Review A Comparative Perspective

Human Rights and Judicial Review: A Comparative Perspective collects, in one volume, a basic description of the most important principles and methods of analysis followed by the major Courts enforcing constitutional Bills of Rights around the world. The Courts include the Supreme Courts of Japan, India, Canada and the United States, the Constitutional Courts of Germany and Italy and the European Court of Human Rights. Each chapter is devoted to an analysis of the substantive jurisprudence developed by these Courts to determine whether a challenged law is constitutional or not, and is written by members of these Courts who have had a prior academic career. The book highlights the similarities and differences in the analytical methods used by these courts in determining whether or not someone's constitutional rights have been violated. Students and scholars of constitutional law and human rights, judges and advocates engaged in constitutional litigation will find the book a unique and valuable resource.

This book is the first application of the comparative method to the analysis of both the basic features of judicial process and their evolution and profound transformation in Europe and America. Cappelletti discusses the challenges facing the courts of justice and other adjudicatory agencies, and evaluates the solutions adopted by contemporary legal systems.

This book investigates judicial deference to the administration in judicial review, a concept and legal practice that can be found to a greater or lesser degree in every constitutional system. In each system, deference functions differently, because the positioning of the judiciary with regard to the separation of powers, the role of the courts as a mechanism of checks and balances, and the scope of judicial review differ. In addition, the way deference works within the constitutional system itself is complex, multi-faceted and often covert. Although judicial deference to the administration is a topical theme in comparative administrative law, a general examination of national systems is still lacking. As such, a theoretical and empirical review is called for. Accordingly, this book presents national reports from 15 jurisdictions, ranging from Argentina, Canada and the US, to the EU. Constituting the outcome of the 20th General Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law, held in Fukuoka, Japan in July 2018, it offers a valuable and unique resource for the study of comparative administrative law.

Judicial control of public power ensures a guarantee of the rule of law. This book addresses the scope and limits of judicial control at the national level, i.e. the control of public authorities, and at the supranational level, i.e. the control of States. It explores the risk of judicial review leading to judicial activism that can threaten the principle of the separation of powers or the legitimate exercise of state powers. It analyzes how national and supranational legal systems have embodied certain mechanisms, such as the principles of reasonableness, proportionality, deference and margin of appreciation, as well as the horizontal effects of human rights that help to determine how far a judge can go. Taking a theoretical and comparative view, the book first examines the conceptual bases of the various control systems and then studies the models, structural elements, and functions of the control instruments in selected countries and regions. It uses country and regional reports as the basis for the comparison of the convergences and divergences of the implementation of control in certain countries of Europe, Latin America, and Africa. The book’s theoretical reflections and comparative investigations provide answers to important questions, such as whether or not there are nascent universal principles concerning the control of public power, how strong the impact of particular legal traditions is, and to what extent international law concepts have had harmonizing and strengthening effects on internal public-power control.

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 the 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.

It is well known that the scope of individual rights has expanded dramatically in the United States over the last half-century. Less well known is that other countries have experienced "rights revolutions" as well. Charles R. Epp argues that, far from being the fruit of an activist judiciary, the ascendancy of civil rights and liberties has rested on the democratization of access to the courts—the influence of advocacy groups, the establishment of governmental enforcement agencies, the growth of financial and legal resources for ordinary citizens, and the strategic planning of grass roots organizations. In other words, the shift in the rights of individuals is best understood as a "bottom up," rather than a "top down," phenomenon. The Rights Revolution is the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the growth of civil rights, examining the high courts of the United States, Britain, Canada, and India within their specific constitutional and cultural contexts. It brilliantly revises our understanding of the relationship between courts and social change.

Constitutionalism is the permanent quest to control state power, of which the judicial review of legislation is a prime example. Although the judicial review of legislation is increasingly common in modern societies, it is not a finished project. This device still raises questions as to whether judicial review is justified, and how it may be structured. Yet, judicial review’s justification and its scope are seldom addressed in the same study, thereby making for an inconvenient divorce of these two related avenues of study. To narrow the divide, the object of this work is quite straightforward. Namely, is the idea of judicial review defensible, and what influences its design and scope? This book addresses these matters by comparing the judicial review of legislation in the United Kingdom (the Human Rights Act of 1998), the Netherlands (the Halsema Proposal of 2002) and the Constitution of South Africa of 1996. These systems present valuable material to study the issues raised by judicial review. The Netherlands is of particular interest as its Constitution still prohibits the constitutional review of acts of parliament, while allowing treaty review of such acts. The Halsema Proposal wants to even out this difference by allowing the courts also to apply constitutional norms to legislation and not only to international norms. The Human Rights Act and the South African Constitution also present interesting questions that will make their study worthwhile. One can think of the issue of dialogue between the legislature and the judiciary. This topic enjoys increased attention in the United Kingdom but is somewhat underexplored in South African thought on judicial review. These and similar issues are studied in each of the three systems, to not only gain a better understanding of the systems as such, but also of judicial review in general.

This book discusses affirmative action or positive discrimination, defined as measures awarding privileges to certain groups that have historically suffered discrimination or have been underrepresented in specific social sectors. The book’s underlying rationale is that one cannot place at the same starting point people who have been treated differently in the past because in this way one merely perpetuates a state of difference and, in turn, social gaps are exaggerated and social cohesion is endangered. Starting out with an introduction on the meaning and typology of affirmative action policies, the book goes on to emphasise the interaction of affirmative action with traditional values of liberal state, such as equality, meritocracy, democracy, justice, liberalism and socialism. It reveals the affirmative action goals from a legal and sociological point of view, examining the remedial, cultural, societal, pedagogical and economy purposes of such action. After applying an institutional narrative of the implementation of affirmative action worldwide, the book explains the jurisprudence on the issue through syntheses and antitheses of structural and material variables, such as the institutional recognition of the policies, the domains of their implementation and their beneficiaries. The book eventually makes an analytical impact assessment following the implementation of affirmative action plans and the judicial response, especially in relation to the conventional human rights doctrine, by establishing a liaison between affirmative action and social and group rights.. The book applies a multi-disciplinary and comparative methodology in order to assess the ethical standing of affirmative action policies, the public interests involved and their effectiveness towards actual equality. In the light of the above analysis, the monograph explains the arguments considering affirmative action as a theology for substantive equality and the arguments treating this policy as anathema for liberalism. A universal discussion currently at its peak.