Judicial Dissent In European Constitutional Courts

Dissent in courts has always existed. It is natural and healthy that judges disagree on legal issues of a certain importance and difficulty. The question is if it is reasonable to conceal dissent. Not every legal system allows judges to explain their disagreement to the public in a separate opinion attached to the judgment of the court. Most constitutional courts do. This book presents a comparative analysis of the practice of judicial dissent in constitutional courts from the perspective of the civil law tradition. It discusses the theoretical background, presents the history of the institution and today’s practice, thus laying down the basis for an accurate consideration of the phenomenon from a legal perspective.

This book analyses the specificity of the law-making activity of European constitutional courts. The main hypothesis is that currently constitutional courts are positive legislators whose position in the system of State organs needs to be redefined. The book covers the analysis of the law-making activity of four constitutional courts in Western countries: Germany, Italy, Spain, and France; and six constitutional courts in Central–East European countries: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Latvia, and Bulgaria; as well as two international courts: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The work thus identifies the mutual interactions between national constitutional courts and international tribunals in terms of their law-making activity. The chosen countries include constitutional courts which have been recently captured by populist governments and subordinated to political powers. Therefore, one of the purposes of the book is to identify the change in the law-making activity of those courts and to compare it with the activity of constitutional courts from countries in which democracy is not viewed as being under threat. Written by national experts, each chapter addresses a series of set questions allowing accessible and meaningful comparison. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics, and policy-makers working in the areas of constitutional law and politics.

Víctor Ferreres Comella contrasts the European 'centralised' constitutional court model, in which one court system is used to adjudicate constitutional questions, with a decentralised model such as that of the United States, in which courts deal with both constitutional and non-constitutional questions.

Central European Constitutional Courts in the Face of EU Membership explores German legal influence on other systems of constitutional justice, concentrating on the impact of the Federal Constitutional Court’s approach to EU integration on constitutional courts in Hungary and Poland.

This translation into English of the leading German-language work on the Federal Constitutional Court gives an overview of the court's history and role as one of the most influential constitutional courts in recent years. The book consists of four extended, free-standing essays written by each of the authors. The essays cover the historical development and political context of the Court; the Court and the constitution; the Court's approach to judicial reasoning; and the Court in contemporary constitutional theory.

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities in several European countries have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature. Some political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power and politics has been extremely judicialized. This volume accurately and systematically examines the extent to which this aggregation of power may have constrained the dominant political actors’ room for manoeuvre. To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the contributors to this work have elaborated a methodology to give a more nuanced picture of the practice of constitutional adjudication in Central and Eastern Europe between 1990 and 2020. The work opens with an assessment of the existing literature on empirical analysis of judicial decisions with a special focus on the Central and Eastern European region, and a short summary of the methodology of the project. This is followed by ten country studies and a concluding chapter providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of the results. A further nine countries are explored in the counterpart volume to this book: Constitutional Review in Western Europe: Judicial-Legislative Relations in Comparative Perspective. The collection will be an invaluable resource for those working in the areas of empirical legal research and comparative constitutional law, as well as political scientists interested in judicial politics.

Explores the relationship between the legitimacy, the efficacy, and the decision-making of national and transnational constitutional courts.

A comparative perspective of role played by three generations of European Constitutional Courts in the process of transition to democracy.