Weak Courts Strong Rights

Mark Tushnet uses a comparative legal perspective to show how creating weaker forms of judicial review may actually allow for stronger social welfare rights under American constitutional law.

In his 1996 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton announced that the "age of big government is over." Some Republicans accused him of cynically appropriating their themes, while many Democrats thought he was betraying the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. Mark Tushnet argues that Clinton was stating an observed fact: the emergence of a new constitutional order in which the aspiration to achieve justice directly through law has been substantially chastened. Tushnet argues that the constitutional arrangements that prevailed in the United States from the 1930s to the 1990s have ended. We are now in a new constitutional order--one characterized by divided government, ideologically organized parties, and subdued constitutional ambition. Contrary to arguments that describe a threatened return to a pre-New Deal constitutional order, however, this book presents evidence that our current regime's animating principle is not the old belief that government cannot solve any problems but rather that government cannot solve any more problems. Tushnet examines the institutional arrangements that support the new constitutional order as well as Supreme Court decisions that reflect it. He also considers recent developments in constitutional scholarship, focusing on the idea of minimalism as appropriate to a regime with chastened ambitions. Tushnet discusses what we know so far about the impact of globalization on domestic constitutional law, particularly in the areas of international human rights and federalism. He concludes with predictions about the type of regulation we can expect from the new order. This is a major new analysis of the constitutional arrangements in the United States. Though it will not be received without controversy, it offers real explanatory and predictive power and provides important insights to both legal theorists and political scientists.

Unlike many other countries, the United States has few constitutional guarantees of social welfare rights such as income, housing, or healthcare. In part this is because many Americans believe that the courts cannot possibly enforce such guarantees. However, recent innovations in constitutional design in other countries suggest that such rights can be judicially enforced--not by increasing the power of the courts but by decreasing it. In Weak Courts, Strong Rights, Mark Tushnet uses a comparative legal perspective to show how creating weaker forms of judicial review may actually allow for stronger social welfare rights under American constitutional law. Under "strong-form" judicial review, as in the United States, judicial interpretations of the constitution are binding on other branches of government. In contrast, "weak-form" review allows the legislature and executive to reject constitutional rulings by the judiciary--as long as they do so publicly. Tushnet describes how weak-form review works in Great Britain and Canada and discusses the extent to which legislatures can be expected to enforce constitutional norms on their own. With that background, he turns to social welfare rights, explaining the connection between the "state action" or "horizontal effect" doctrine and the enforcement of social welfare rights. Tushnet then draws together the analysis of weak-form review and that of social welfare rights, explaining how weak-form review could be used to enforce those rights. He demonstrates that there is a clear judicial path--not an insurmountable judicial hurdle--to better enforcement of constitutional social welfare rights.

In the United Kingdom during the past decade, individuals and groups have increasingly tested the extent to which principles of English administrative law can be used to gain entitlements to health and welfare services and priority for the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. One of the primary purposes of this book is to demonstrate the extent to which established boundaries of judicial intervention in socio-economic disputes have been altered by the extension of judicial powers in sections 3 and 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998, and through the development of a jurisprudence of positive obligations in the European Convention on Human Rights 1950. Thus, the substantive focus of the book is on developments in the constitutional law of the United Kingdom. However, the book also addresses key issues of theoretical human rights, international and comparative constitutional law. Issues of justiciability in English administrative law have therefore been explored against a background of two factors: a growing acceptance of the need for balance in the protection in modern constitutional arrangements afforded to civil and political rights on the one hand and socio-economic rights on the other hand; and controversy as to whether courts could make a more effective contribution to the protection of socio-economic rights with the assistance of appropriately tailored constitutional provisions.

Stephen Gardbaum proposes and examines a new way of protecting rights in a democracy.

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

Bold and unconventional, this book advocates for an institutional turn-about in the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism.

After more than seventy years of uninterrupted authoritarian government headed by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Mexico formally began the transition to democracy in 2000. Unlike most other new democracies in Latin America, no special Constitutional Court was set up, nor was there any designated bench of the Supreme Court for constitutional adjudication. Instead, the judiciary saw its powers expand incrementally. Under this new context inevitable questions emerged: How have the justices interpreted the constitution? What is the relation of the court with the other political institutions? How much autonomy do justices display in their decisions? Has the court considered the necessary adjustments to face the challenges of democracy? It has become essential in studying the new role of the Supreme Court to obtain a more accurate and detailed diagnosis of the performances of its justices in this new political environment. Through critical review of relevant debates and using original data sets to empirically analyze the way justices voted on the three main means of constitutional control from 2000 through 2011, leading legal scholars provide a thoughtful and much needed new interpretation of the role the judiciary plays in a country’s transition to democracy This book is designed for graduate courses in law and courts, judicial politics, comparative judicial politics, Latin American institutions, and transitions to democracy. This book will equip scholars and students with the knowledge required to understand the importance of the independence of the judiciary in the transition to democracy.